Sunday, September 26, 2010

Doesn't even taste like soap

Dear everyone,

You know how you love Thai food and then you decide to try cooking it and it doesn't turn out too bad so you reckon you could get down with nature and grow some of that coriander in a pot and so you buy some and it immediately dies and so you buy some more and plant it in the dirt and it goes to seed more quickly than the stuff you bought in pots carked it and you swear off trying to grow it ever again and go back to paying two bucks a bunch from the supermarket and it's always slimy and you end up associating Thai cooking with slight failure even before you start?

I used to be like that.

Used to.

But it turns out nature works.

That bit where it goes to seed? Apparently those seeds contain some of free-love, hippie-huggin' magic because now I ain't growing bunches of coriander, I'm growing trees.

Check out my forest.


Yeah.
King Coriander swingin' through tha treez
(of coriander).
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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

How could I forget?

Silly me. I completely forgot to mention what I did on the weekend.
It was this:



I play hockey. That's me receiving a gold medal for winning the grand final with my fine team of scholars, maniacs and roustabouts. By jingo it was exciting. More exciting for the fact that we beat the team of dolts and drongos who I was playing last year when a particularly doltish drongo swung through and dislocated my thumb. I know he couldn't have purposely aimed to dislocate my thumb and leave me unable to care for my infant son properly for a good few months (try changing a nappy one-handed), but he certainly is the kind of stubby-fingered arsehole who makes it his business to slip in as much dirty and dangerous play as he can get away with.
How do I know this?
I spent the entire game marking him.
Yes, the same guy.
The same guy who cost me two days in hospital, a week off work, months of therapy and a career loosening jars for Mele.
I know he's the same guy because he deliberately stuck his stick between my legs to trip me over.
And I had to follow him around for 70 minutes and stop him ever touching the ball or coming near our goal.
Did I do this?
Did I ever.
And I marked him off the field.
He had nothin'. Slow, grumpy, unfit and, at the end of the game, medal-less.
My one regret is that I didn't get to shake his hand and show him mine.



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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