Sunday, October 14, 2012

Weekend round up

Sore shoulder. Persisted for some days. Went to physio. It's from leaning on one elbow for too long while devouring Cloud Atlas. You know your fightin' days are over when you get taken down by a reading injury. 
Fleshing out a repeat lecture on young adult fiction. Decided to look up some details for Catcher in the Rye. Found out that it's never been made into a movie. Had the same emotional response I did when I found out that Bil Watterson never licensed Calvin and Hobbes. It's 2-stage response that goes like this:
  1. It's wonderful that there are still some artists in the world who just want to create. Who believe in the purity of their vision, who don't want their work diluted until it's nothing more than a homeopathic representation of what they set out to achieve. 
  2. Following a brief trip to Wikipedia. Hmph. Well, it's pretty damn easy to insist on artistic integrity when you sell 45 and 65 million books respectively.

4 comments:

  1. I'd love to sell out, but nobody's buying.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If you're interested in selling out, I'll buy you a steak.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I always get sore from reading. Though never needed to go to a physio, that's impressive.
    I was disappointed to see Cloud Atlas was not about clouds, but sounds intriguing. Judging from your injury, I might suggest it for book club.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh but it IS about clouds!
      Book group ahoy before it becomes a famous movie. Your hipster window is fast closing!

      Delete

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