Monday, May 21, 2012

Not a book in sight



Bonus fun tip  to try at your home or someone else's: Get a whole heap of dry tree stumps and a log splitter (a log splitter is an axe with a thicker wedge). Put one of the tree stumps on top of the other and hit it dead centre with the splitter. Pretend to be Thor and shout 'I am your KING' as the entire thing miraculously falls in half. Repeat until all tree stumps are gone. Bring split tree stumps inside and burn for family.

4 comments:

  1. ...and yet you're both bare foot? Where are the bed socks and uggs?

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  2. I think you're missing the raging fire built with Thor's Log Splitter, centre shot.

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  3. Oooh, kindles! I love mine to bits and I've only had it for 6 days. I still love real books too.
    Your fire brings to mind the heater we used to have in winter 1987-9, it had a wide flat top and we kept a large kettle of water on it all winter long. We'd bring it forward over the flames area to heat up for coffee, then shove it to the back again to keep warm until we wanted the next cuppa. On weekends we'd cook soup on it by putting the pot there in the morning and the soup would be ready by dinnertime.
    I never had to split my own mallee stumps though. K and his dad did them.

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  4. River - Confession: mine's an iPad and I'm just reading it for the photo.
    And, while I'm flattered about the mallee stumps, I must admit publicly that they are all very dry pine and pretty much fall apart moment you look at them harshly. They also burn almost as fast as you can feed them into the blaze. Suddenly that massive pile isn't looking so impressive ...

    ReplyDelete

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