Franzy fights on

And here's what I wrote in the (surprisingly ample) feedback section of the Greater Union customer survey after buying some online tickets:

"You cinemas need to start being up front about why allocated seating has been introduced. No contacts know. The staff shrug and smile and take your wad of cash. It inconveniences patrons and restricts the enjoyment of my movie-going experience to be sat next to a stranger and not be able to choose the location of my seat upon entering the cinema.
Sharing elbow room with someone I've never met was never on my list of Things To Do At The Movies.
Why the gritted-teeth is it on there now?
To phase out ticketing staff and ease us into online bookings and buy-your-ticket-here pillars? You're competing with 50" plasmas and surround-sound in people's homes! The only thing you've GOT over that is customer service. I've had friends who now avoid going to the cinemas now because of allocated seating. My mother gave up her 10-year membership to Palace Nova on the back of this short-sightedness. She wrote them a long letter to explain why. Customer service? She didn't even receive a reply. You try telling me that you're a different company who listens to the concerns of its patrons? Rubbish. To theatre-goers, you are now all one and the one same. Brand loyalty is dead dead dead.
Don't give me that bluster about Gold seating, either. $35 for the chance at a hot nachos in the second reel is NOT a fun family outing. OR a low-pressure date. The cinema used to be the place where teenagers could meet up and not have to make awkward conversation. Now you've priced them right out of the market. Wake up.
If you don't want customers, just shut down now with dignity and stop taking everyone's money and enjoyment with you."

You may thank me in the comments when allocated seating is abolished and a quiet young man with a side-part and a small torch is guiding you to your $5 seat.

I don't care if it IS an OH&S issue

if I come into the lunchroom and there are bowls, cups, spoons, food containers or coffee plungers sitting in the sink, soaking in cold water, grease and cabbage, I will assume that, because they are in the sink (o ye crucible of cleansing!), they are all clean and washed up and only in need of neat stacking on the drying rack, which I am more than happy to do for you.

Parenting:

Have you touched poo today?

Even though I can barely hear anything being said in a less-than-silent environment and every year I have to turn the radio up one more notch, all those concerts were totally worth it.

Dear Dan, Please code ...

... a Facebook app that lifts your workplace's website layout and transfers all of your time-wasting garbage into a page which, at a glance from your workmates or boss, looks exactly as though you were just checking the company's homepage. ©

Franzy's stats indicate that...

... if an arsehole in a wallowy, neutered, gone-to-fat-but-still-taking-up-space four-wheel-drive cuts you off, doesn't let you in or runs over your dog because they were too busy rubbing their nipples with fluffy tufts of cotton wool teased from the padding with which they surround their brains and souls, they are 95% more likely to be driving a Toyota Kluger.

Your love is like a yiros:

Thick, meaty and dripping yogurt sauce.

I always take the last piece.

DuSSSty Extra

And almost a year later, the Being of Earth reached Sydney from the Hay Plane where it had been washing travellers with the dust of the ages.

Why does inspiration arrive on the toilet and depart with the wiping of your hands?

It's a gift for a worthy foe ...

Yes, name your condom after a people famous for constructing a massive, sturdy symbol of masculinity, but did it have to be the same folks who were famous for tricking everybody into bringing that gargantuan totem inside, only for it to break open, spilling out death, destruction and Brad Pitt?

How can I tell that this isn't some elaborate piece of crappy performance art; The Truman Show, but with a busker's hat?

1000 words

Don't tell a new parent what they should do, you idiot.

When people ask how I was raised, I tell them "Sociologist Circus Freak".

She knows my music tastes so well that she can direct me to any and every cheap, ring-tone-friendly, auto-tuned knock off I'm sure to love.

So, I assume that because you're crossing the picket line and working, you'll be passing on all the extra pay you receive as a result of the industrial action to the union?

You know you're tragically old when ...

... you reminisce, without irony, about the soft, sweet grunting of a 5 ¼ inch floppy drive because you have actually owned computers that had them.

Just fucking wait until I'm out of the lift before you try to squeeze in, you bonehead.

The more silent you are trying to be after everyone else has gone to bed, the more steel pots will slip out of your hands while you're doing the dishes.

Fear is ...

... starting him on mashed pumpkin and, as the weekend looms, hearing in detail about exactly what happens in that nappy when I'm at work.

He will probably say his first word while I'm at work.

You can't possibly imagine the embarrassment and contempt I feel for the twenty-one year old me who didn't have the dignity, the restraint and self-confidence not to unsheathe a big, rubbery exclamation mark at the end of just about every significant sentence I ever tried to have published, like a plaid-clad comedian demonstrating when the punchline has occurred in a routine about bitchy mother-in-laws and poor-quality airline food by slapping a brass gong with a dildo.

SSS EXtra!

I'm 16, I'm sailing the world, I'm getting my pins out!

And now I am a ... what?

I was a clown in a touring youth circus, I've written a joke book, I own a beautiful leather motor-bike jacket I bought in Chapel St and no motorbike, I married an Italian writer, I can cook a tastier pasta sauce than any of her relatives, I buy, read and enjoy car magazines, I review young adult books for a specialist magazine published by Melbourne Uni, I can juggle fire, I can hold a conversation in German as long as nobody starts discussing biomechanics, politics or the war (zing!), I can ski, but not surf, I rent, I will listen to industrial hip-hop as soon as The Flight of the Conchords, my dad teaches English in China, my mum teaches everything here, my son could hold his head up by six weeks, my best man is a professional acrobat and physiotherapist, my oldest friend has a big hand in just about everything you see on the ABC, my third oldest friend got married on an iceberg and I can skol a pint of pale no worries.

I am a ... what?

I garden most weekends, fall asleep in front of ABC crime drama, know about lawn mowers, own more tracksuit pants than those suitable for the public eye, have a subscription to ABR, listen to 891 Mornings with Matt'n'Dave, complain at the video store, call the place where I rent DVDs "the video store" as though it were some retailer of Betamax tapes from beyond the black stump, own antiques, enjoy shopping for antiques more than clothes, drink lattes, maintain facial hair on purpose rather than a result of laziness and buy and drive Toyotas because my mechanic recommends them.

200 posts in blogger doesn't seem like a lot (especially when 60 or so are only a sentence long).

The moment I have the house all to myself I ...

... listen to the loudest, beefiest, air-punchiest, dioxygenated-guitar-struminest music possible.

Since I checked with the council and found out that you don't own the entire street, stop fucking with my rear-view mirror.

Ever finished drying yourself after a shower and found a pube on your tongue?

If someone asks you "Can I ask you a question?" and you answer "Yes", is the conversation over?

I suspect that humans are the only species to dress their own young as the young of predatory species.

It's that time of year.