Thursday, March 17, 2011

It may actually be filled with some kind of beer

I passed it in. All 23,000 words.*


And the most exciting thing I could think about for the whole process was flicking through it before I let it go and noticing that I had actually gotten up to 8 footnotes and there it was, sitting down the bottom of page more-than-4, intelligently informing the reader that if they wanted more information, they could squint down at the helpful little 10 point font.

Yes, it was a reference to my new favourite long-term study/internet whimsy site, but, darn it all, it was useful:

8 This tendency for middle-class Australians to align themselves with images of hardship often followed by deserved success has been noted and documented in great detail for comic effect in Things Bogans Like (McSween, Hubbard et al., 2010).

In semi-related news: someone rear-ended me yesterday and, as well as paying for everything, bought me this delicious bottle of wine.



*Calm down. It was just the literature review. I've still got the rest of the actual thesis to go. You know: the part with my ideas instead of someone else's.
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2 comments:

  1. Kath LockettFriday, March 18, 2011 at 1:48:00 AM PDT

    Oh. Bugger that explanatory asterisk - I was all busy thinking, "Wow, that's pretty brief for a final manuscript, soon-to-be Dr Franzway?"

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  2. AshleighSaturday, April 9, 2011 at 2:47:00 AM PDT

    Australians align themselves with hardship... Hmm... reminds me of my neighbour the businessman who inherited his business from his father. Who has a huge house so big it boggles my mind. Who runs his (noisy) heating system all winter - at a cost that boggles my mind. Who plays with expensive cars. And who has Jimmy Barnes belting out "Working Class Man" over and over from his shed. Hmmmm...

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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