Wednesday, September 24, 2008


The difference between my high school and Mele's is that they taught us about baby-making in Biology rather than Home Economics.


6 comments:

  1. Ah but the home economics bit comes *after* the baby arrives. The Web of Life, standard biology book since about 1960....a bit of plant molecules and a bit of sex.

    Not sure where the home ec advice came into it though. Did Mele go to a Catholic Girls' school by any chance?

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  2. Kath - B-B-B-BINGO! Yes, hearing Mele and I discuss our different high school experiences one would think that we were actually from different countries. One where there was a fairly strict observance of religious fundamentalism and the other where people did pretty much whatever they liked all the time and were never prosecuted for some reason...

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  3. I did Childcare as one of my "free" electives (it was a country town so there wasn't much in the way of electives). It was in the Home Ec room

    We had to carry this egg around and pretend it was a baby. I dropped mine before I got to name it. I got another egg but I never really bonded with it like the other girls who had eggs called Eggbert and Eggwina with little egg clothes and wotnot

    It was eggsruciating!!

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  4. In my high school very basic sex-ed was covered in biology, (more was probably learned in the higher grades that I didn't get to), while in Home Economics we learnt to make a bed properly, how to dry clean a school tie, and how to cook a sponge cake. Totally useless subjects to me since I was never going to dry clean anything EVER, beds were smoothed just enough, and my dad's sponge cake recipe was much simpler than the one the school tried to teach me.

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  5. Squib - Heh. That reminds me of a certain Degrassi episode ... which I now have on DVD! That show taught me so much aboot life.

    River - Our home ec was only practical if you owned a sewing machine (the career-orientated version pointed you towards fashion design) or couldn't cook (so and me this other guy spent entire cooking lessons preparing things very very quickly and subsequently making fun of all the other morons: "I burnt my onions, miss! Can I have a new one?"
    Actually, my cooking teacher had some kind of mum-crush on me because she was always rubbing my arms and telling me what beautiful eyes I had ... in front of the entire class ... while I was choking on some rice.

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  6. Our sex ed class was taken by a nun...

    When I pointed out the logic gap, I was nearly suspended.

    Mind, they nearly suspended me for my Kim Wilde T-shirt an all...

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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