Sunday, August 19, 2012

Fwoooaarr ... who routed?


It's not childish if you're a big stinky bum bum.






Other potential captions included:
"Pull my ethernet cable!"
"Wireless? I wish I was Noseless!"
and the distant runner-up:
"Hey buddy! Your modem stinks!"

Saturday, August 11, 2012

What? This old thing?

'Excuse me! Excuse me!' called the woman, tapping Mele on the shoulder as we returned from the museum. 'Where did you get your coat?'
Mele told her.
'It's wonderful!' cried the lady. 'I love it!'

That lady had good taste.


Tuesday, August 7, 2012

I should have thrown in some fly trombones

I know we all enjoyed my attempts to hang onto the fickel caretaker audience at work But I have literally been working in the dark and carrying my own boxes since then because I was suffering from the well-documented 'Difficult 3rd Album' version of email.

I may have gone overboard on the solution:

To: Caretakers at work
From: franzy 

*please play this youtube video while reading this email*

I got to work this morning
It was real foggy on tha hill
I went into [redacted] Level 1
And I started workin’, ‘til
I noticed something dark
Real dark in room 113
The fluoro tube above the sink
Wasn’t shinin’ no light on me

Wasn’t shinin’ no light
No suh, not shinin’ no light

I’m askin’ please come fix it
It’s not real urgent, but it’s quick to do
But until then I guess I’ll have
The broken fluoro blues

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Then there's this guy


He said he was talking it home for dinner.
I believe him.
I believe everything the Rain God says.

Then there's my insatiable bloodlust, but that's not really unusual

Allow me to me sum up the last 24 hours in such a way that anyone who's into using the full moon as a catch all explanation for weirdness can instantly climb aboard:

Last night, at about 9:45pm, my studious studying was interrupted by an extremely loud alarm. It wasn't a car, it wasn't a house, but it was coming from somewhere. So, I did what any suburbanite does when they hear an unusual warning signal: I ignored it.
Until the pre-recorded voice began chanting "Emergency. Evacuate immediately. Emergency. Evacuate immediately." and so on. My first guess was 'exploding petrol stadium', but the confused lady at Sturt Police Station told me that it was probably Hindmarch Stadium and there was nothing to worry about, dear.

Cut to: this morning. Everything is going well. I've even got mostly matching socks. We execute the logistical ballet of dropping Charlie and my car off to their various care centres with Olympic finesse. Mel and I are on the work run when wwwwooooOOOOOAAAAAHHHH!!! BRRRAAAKEESSSSS!!! The car in front pulls up very short in the queue and Mel is quick on the anchors, saving our arses by mere feet. We start to congratulate one-another on such a-BAM.
We get rear-ended.
The lady behind us wasn't so spritely on the middle pedal and it's another morning bingle.
We are really shaken this time.
But before we even get a chance to get out of the car, my phone rings.
It's Mel's old school chum, inviting me to appear on a reality TV show as her 'close male friend'.
'Sure thing,' I say, even though I disapprove of reality TV. 'I've just been hit by a car, I've got to go.'
It's only as I'm typing this that I'm beginning to understand what I actually signed up for.

Coming this summer on 10, I suppose...

Also, we were in the local media, not once but twice this week. I might even reconsider going outside in future, just to avoid this sort of thing.

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