Friday, September 5, 2008

6 comments:

  1. True, very true. Kick arse picture by the way - this is the sort of thing that postsecret.com would love.

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  2. Kath - I like the picture because almost everything in it was bought to make me happy. I'm looking at postsecret now and I call bullshit on about half of the cards there. They're too show-offy and thought to be real secrets. I'm just waiting for the one which says "I made up an unhappy relationship and wrote about it on a postcard just so I could be on this website".
    An interesting thing to come from it was seeing these Six Word Memoirs compiled by another blog. I almost feel like they stole my idea ... in the past.

    Squib - Oh, just you wait!
    Actually I did this one because I was thinking of ideas for this single sentence stuff and of course forgot to stop thinking about them after bedtime and the only things that came to hand for writing down ideas were CD pens and this bottle.
    Because my, ah, indispensable moleskin notebook was, ah, full.

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  3. I don't agree with that statement at all. There are plenty of other reasons for feeling bad.

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  4. River - Thank you. I agree with you. I think this was supposed to be a reflexive statement about the increasingly insidious nature of advertising and the way we're trained to have emotions about things that result in us purchasing products. Eg: a mother feeling guilty for not disinfecting her benchtops. Every day. What if my children get sick? So she buys disinfectants.
    Ditto gym memberships, sports cars, jewellery, cosmetics, clothes, etc. How necessary are those products? What holes are they trying fill?

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  5. Looks like the a bottle bong to me! Weed induced philosophy perhaps?

    (Came over from Kath's and love the concept but I'm not clever enough to post in just one sentence!)

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An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test

Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

Champions of Guess The Header

  • What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
  • Nai - 1
  • Lion Kinsman - 2
  • Will - 2
  • Brocky - 2
  • Andy Pants - 2
  • The 327th Male - 3
  • Mad Cat Lady - 3
  • Miles McClagen - 4
  • Myninjacockle - 4
  • Asheligh - 5
  • Neil - 5
  • Third Cat - 5
  • Adam Y - 6
  • Squib - 6
  • Mele - 6
  • Moifey - 7
  • Jono - 8
  • The Other, other Sam - 14
  • Kath Lockett - 15
  • Shippy - 19
  • River - 32