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.

Did you know that our middle names have the same number of letters?

Inspired by and posted on Jono's post about the Sydney Writer's Festival:

"I like Writers Festivals for the hilarity of watching the middle-aged book-reading crazies, even after being told to keep questions brief, frame their own questions with a personal history that inevitably begins with:

• a childhood somewhere regional, usually with a dirt thoroughfare somewhere in the background (a road, a hallway, even a bedroom) and an encouraging parent stalwartly raising many children single-handedly,
• their own discovery of reading (sprinkled with author names so obscure and brilliant they never even wrote anything),
• an education-based upheaval (encouraging teacher, lecturer, tutor, uni book-group/slash key party)
  
• a personal upheaval (divorce, rat-bag kids, dissatisfying workplace, terminal illness),
• a thinly-veiled hint at their own bottom-desk-drawer-based novel (this hint is poetry itself: nowhere can you condense all of the above history along with a rigid self-belief in its importance, a rigid refusal to let anyone but the author read it and rigid, poisonous ire at the entire publishing industry, from paper-mill down to Borders delivery driver, for its stupidity in rejecting said desk-drawer manuscript in one throw-away line: "I've even dabbled with the word processor myself ..."), and
  
• the mandatory nudge-wink about some shared aspect of their own lives with the author's before finally, just as the chair is giving the secret signal to the sound techo to cut the mic and pretend it was a mysterious power-outage, the question itself tumbles out, all squished and over-baked and sounding like "So, where do you get your ideas?", but in the context of the previous 14 minute, inhalation-free monologue, actually meaning "You understand me. We are going to be great friends. Let's start now. NOW!"

My favourite Writer's Week moment was when Robert Fisk was roundly applauded after he told a man to go away and stop talking because the man had, after making a very long speech about how he and Robert Fisk could quite possibly solve all of the world's problems through a meeting of their easily-comparable minds and being politely interrupted, he grabbed the microphone off the next question-asker.
"I'm not finished!" he yelled into the microphone as he and the next senior-citizen bodily wrestled each other for the final three-and-a-half minutes of question time. This isn't an exaggeration - take about five years off those two fellows and they would have been throwing punches among the sunhats and signed copies. And this was after an hour-long, extremely fascinating and convincing talk by Robert Fisk, world-famous war correspondent, about the pointlessness and futility of violent conflict.

I love Writer's Weeks.

Built-in built-in obsolescence

How come you're not supposed to leave sun-screen in the sun?

***

GTH - Shippy. Well played, grash-hopper. Tell Captain Fucking Useless to make me proud.

Current mood:

Hanging up new clothes to dry and crying with joy.

***

GTH - River - "If I had a dollar for every set of earbuds I've had to throw out because of one broken wire, I could probably afford to buy, oh, maybe one more set of ear buds." - 1 point and ThirdCat - "I love Roger Federer" MINUS 1 point! "... but I love Nadal more." PLUS 2 points.

Homework? On the weekend? Groan!

Belief in fate is the refuge of the irresponsible.
Discuss.


Hint: Perhaps I shouldn't listen to Tool while waiting for a late bus ...

After four months without the ABC, Sam realised two things: 1) that The Gruen Transfer has made everyone experts on media and advertising analysis and 2) that he will spend the rest of his days and money attempting to procure a drumkit, a gorilla costume, a video camera and tickets to every simian revival rock concert that comes to town.

It was just after the owner of the caravan park said that she didn't like my t-shirt because of her "strong ties of Buddhism" that I stopped communicating with fully-formed words and started using my wide command of grunts, nods and smiles.

Dream interpretation: they are just the brain's way of using the massive amount of information it gathers and stores to consider the past, ruminate upon the present and plan for the future.

I'm so damn old-school that I watch The Simpsons on analogue broadcast with the ads.

The difference between my high school and Mele's is that they taught us about baby-making in Biology rather than Home Economics.

The Coffee Club on Bribie Island does not distribute the tips dropped by customers into the bulbous green tip jar to its employees.

I often I wake up next to Mele scratching furiously in her sleep after a waking dream that a wolf has dragged us into its subterranean den and is devouring her body while I struggle to wake and save her.

I propose a new blogging standard: Franzy's Law states that referring to one's own blog or blogging activities as a "rant" or "ranting" shall designate the author incapable of expressing ideas without resorting to violence or anger and thus the kind of person not really worth reading until they can calm down and relate their ideas properly without shouting or "talking foolishly".

The phrase "wrong on so many levels" is only used by people who, when pressed, won't be able to come up with more than a few levels of wrongness and are, unsurprisingly, also the kind of people who are more likely to confuse "few" with "many".

I wonder if there is a definitive point at which the damage done by the immediate stress of needing something you have thrown away outweighs the effects of the residual stress resulting from keeping some useless piece of crap, moving it from house to house, arguing over its possible value, defending it from efficient loved ones and finding ever larger spaces in which to store it, all the while convincing yourself that some day 46 pillowcases might just come in handy.

I wonder if blogging has genuinely helped a generation to communicate its feelings, thoughts and emotions more succinctly or whether it has now become acceptable to simply hyphenate a long stream-of-consciousness descriptive passage in an I'm-really-enthusiastic-about-writing-and-want-to-appear-creative-and-intelligent-but-can't-quite-bring-myself-to-go-to-all-the-trouble-of-thinking-of-an-appropriate-metaphor-or-even-a-simile-when-I-can-simply-diarise-whatever-I'm-thinking-without-filters-or-editing-or-snipping-of-tangents-while-still-throwing-in-a-few-pop-culturally-acceptable-but-still-cool-and-quirky-as-the-comeback-of-the-cowbell-references-which-prove-that-this-is-really-the-only-path-towards-clear-written-expression-that-English-teachers-and-politicians-hope-for-in-the-yoof-ov-2day-which-isn't-splattered-with-textlish-and-smiley-faces-and-so-will-have-to-do-until-someone-can-work-out-a-way-of-making-spending-a-week-producing-a-single-metaphor-into-an-immediately-pleasurable-exercise kind of way in order to convey one's thoughts.

I know the Domino's Cheaper Tuesday commercial is supposed to make me want to buy shithouse pizzas but for some reason it sends me straight to Google.