Thursday, December 4, 2008

She said "Yeah?" I said "Aw Yeah."

I godda jawb.
Ahm gonna payda reynt.

An then she wuz so nais!

Lawd she wa' lubbydubby.


The sound of my phone ringing has always made me apprehensive. I hate to be the one without the info. I hate it when the tingle goes up and it could change your life. The wait after a job interview is in the top ten worst times for a phone to ring. At least when you get the little white letter, you know what's up before you answer the call.
But when the phone rin
gs it could go either way.
Or it
could also be a telemarketer. Especially at 5:15pm on a Wednesday.

"Hello, Franzy speaking."
"Hello Franzy, it's Mr Employer here. How are you?"
"I'm well." (gather strength, take deep breath). "How are you?"
"I'm fine, thank you. Would you like the good news, or the bad news?"
(Cover mouthpiece to muffle audible groan. Fail to muffle audible groan). "Uhmn. Gimme the bad news."

"The bad news is, my friend ... that you have the job."
(Access mental replay. Confirm information. Thrust fist in air). "What? That's great! Fantastic! Thank you!"
"No problem."
"Wha
t's the good news?"
"The good news is ... that you have the job! Aha!"

So, yes. The transformation is complete. We have moved back from Queensland and I am now employed at somewhere far less useless and more productive than The Coffee Club on Bribie Island. Now I'm drinking the coffee, motherfuckers!



Well - not quite. I start in January. And I'm apparently working for quite a prankster.
Thanks to Shippy for the job-search help. Points for you, buddy.

***

Everyone who was madly searching for The Mysterious Seven Story Structures can take a clue from a wonderful series I recently read called Action Philosophers! Joseph Campbell did many interesting things, but one of them was to ana
lyse stories and myths from a lot of cultures and came up with A Definitive Story Structure, otherwise known as The Hero's Journey. I have scanned it in with complete disregard for copyright below, but please, click the image and have a good look.



That should settle a few arguments.
Or start them.

Update - Ryan Dunlavey, Illustrator of Action Philosophers! has somehow found me! And directed me towards the real deal full colour Hero's Journey poster available for just US$3 (plus postage) (which makes it about $AUS4,507) from the Action Philosopher's website (please click on the image above). I urge everyone to either buy a poster or get their hands on Action Philosophers!

***
Far be it from me to heap scorn upon my learned brothers and sisters but mostly brothers in the sciences, but these two news items couldn't have popped into my reader with finer congruity or better timing.
The first "From nerd to word: maths geeks reclaim their cool" is about a new campaign by the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers to boost the previously "dorky" image of maths. They are attempting to sell the many exciting and lucrative careers options offered by maths.

"It's all to do with imagination," says mathematical stand-up Simon Pampena.
"Most people if you say, `What attracts you to maths?', they wouldn't say, `Imagination'.
"It's usually what repels you from maths and they'd say `Because it's not cool, I'm not going to get a girlfriend doing maths'."

Which brings us neatly to news item number two:
"Male science students uni's most likely virgins: study"

Apparently maths can teach you many things, but good timing isn't one of them.

***
Enthusiasm for last week's movie clippette was so dramatically blunt that I have decided to take my revenge upon you readers who refused to inundate me with copy about your memorable movie moments so that I could rest upon my laurels.
What would you call the scariest movie you've ever seen?
The Grudge?
Saw?
War of the Worlds?
The Ring?
The Omen?
The Sixth Sense?
Scary Movie?

Nuh-uh. Be prepared for a new champion. It is only three and a half minutes long, but trust me on this: you will be curled up in horror as you watch. Many of you may not even make it through. Some of you may actually throw up.
It's safe for work and there's no gore. Just an ill feeling about your entire existence.
Think I'm joking? There's no punchline.
Just watch The World's Scariest Movie.



***

GTH - Points to Kath for the mental image of me busting a shit capoeira-style over a rural French toilet. Or 'toilette'.

10 comments:

  1. Congratulations on the new job Mr Franzy.

    Unfortunately I can not access your scariest movie, so I will have to wait until tonight.

    Oh, scariest movie, hard to say really. I find them kind of funny, although I'm a little disturbed by the imagination of the creators of some of them. Almost as disturbed as I am by the imagination of the creators of Lost (the series). How long can a crashed plane on a single island oasis survive, let alone find twists and turns behind every palm leaf. Probably the thing that scares people about scary movies is imagining you're in the position the heroine or victim finds themself in. I generally cringe at these things.

    Scary would be Paris Hilton's acting career that has lasted at least two movies off the top of my head.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congratulations on the new job Franz!

    I avoid scary movies but the scariest one I've watched from behind a cushion is White Noise. The worse part is MrSquib fell asleep and I had no one to be my eyes for me. Later in bed, a spider crawled on me and I screamed the house down

    ReplyDelete
  3. Aw thanks Franzy, and to see the GTH photo in all it's glory just makes my guess seem even more graphically accurate.

    Congratulations on the new job - can you give us a clue as to what it is? After your birthday video, it's not working at Ted's Camera Store is it?

    That video is nuts....words fail me....Love Chunks wandered over and staggered away, saying, "I feel sick..." Thank god they had enough arm muscles for chin ups!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nowt wrong with working for a prankster. Far, far better than fro somebody dead serious all that time. Scored, there.

    This of course relates to the header. Its a band, see. And cos this a prankster, its not BLAND. A cunning and extremely poor pun.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ryan - Forgive me for staring and blinking stupidly in the sunlight before crumbling into fanboy mode, but ... WHOLE-LY SHIITE!! What the hell are you doing here? I am a huge of Action Philosophers. I think absolutely everyone should go and read and re-read them. Plato Smash!! Yay!!!
    Seriously though, if you want me to take down my crappy scan, you need only to say. I will put a little plug in there for AP and the poster too.

    Shippy - I see by your latest comment that you have finally accessed and watched the world's scariest movie. I find the scariest bit isn't that he's doing it, but that he's having so much trouble. I can't even think about now without feeling sick.

    Squib - I once woke up in the middle of the night, heard a light scrabbling and opened my eyes just in time to see a big black spider traversing the last doona ruck in front of my face.
    I didn't even have enough wind to scream.
    I subsequently spent the next hour searching for that little fucker with a can of Mortein.

    Kath - Thank you. No, no clues - I might write about it, I might not. I can reveal, however, that Ted's Camera Store hasn't returned my resume yet.
    The video. Yes. Did I not promise terror?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ashleigh - You may, somehow, be winning GTH there. Somehow.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hey Franzy - no worries, thanks for the support!
    As to how I found you - it never hurts to do an ego-centric Google Alert

    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