Sontag Blogettes

Things I love about being a meat eater: I arrived home after hockey this week to a house gushing with the taste-bud aching smells of Mele's family pasta sauce recipe. I can reveal for purposes of this story that she puts osso bucco and pork spare ribs in there. I can also reveal for the purposes of this story that Mele had a face like a kid with a mouthful of Brussels sprouts.
"Come with me!" she cried, the moment I stepped through the door. "I've got something I have to show you!"
She dragged me into the kitchen and pointed to the chopping board. On it was a small piece of white gristle. "What do you think that is?" she asked. The gristle was a piece of skin carved from the edge of one of the pork spare ribs. On the piece of skin was a small raised nodule.
"A wart?" I guessed.
"It's a nipple!" she moaned. "I want to die!"
I tried to talk her into the fact that nipples tend to have boobs under them, but she insisted that it was neither wart nor beauty spot. It probably was a nipple. I love eating meat. I've reached a stage in my life where I'll eat or at least try anything that's put in front of me and the thought of seared, dripping blue-cooked steak reclining on a plate in front of me fills me with the animal hungers.

At least it wasn't a tattoo.

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A blog ye muste alle reade: I've only just discovered Myninjacockle's The Loaded Blog and it's the only non-comic site that I've felt compelled to go back and trawl through every single post because each one is an excellent little vignette. The author has either had a lot of practise blogging and discovering what works and what doesn't and what holds an audience, or is one of those talented arseholes who gets it right without even trying. Sceptical? I present for your delectation Exhibit A and, if that's too highbrow, Exhibit B.

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Blurry photos: I've tried to defend my penchant for blurry photos in the past, but I'm beginning to accept that it's probably one of those things that will be appreciated only when I'm dust in the dirt. Or never. People love dat focus stuff yes suh.
However, being how this is my blog and they're my photos, I can do whatever the hell I like. Moify and Ms Moify-To-Be's engagement party was last night and I took a whole bunch of real blurry ones - YEAH!


I hope it is many years before they get around to drinking the wine we gave them because I wrote on the label "All best for your beautiful journey together". Hopefully they decide to drink all their engagement wine in one hit and get to ours last so they don't have wonder too much about why a man who claims to be a writer thought that omitting a "the" would be poetic.

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A photo from the archives: For reasons that will become clear in a future blog, I was digging around some old travel photos from a ski-trip to New Zealand. The following photo was taken after probably the worst night's sleep that either Triton or I have ever had. We got a cabin in the woods somewhere and rugged up for cold night. We weren't too worried because we had a double-barrelled bar heater. At two am, the bar heater died. At 2:15am we both woke up with the feeling that we were both going to die. We considered writing a last will and testament but movement was mostly out of the question. Let the record also show that even with the spectre of death from hypothermia looming large we did not declare prison rules and share a sleeping bag.

The next morning we shouted at the manager and were given no refund for our Night of Icy Doom. There was nothing left to do but go to Glenorchy and sit in the sunlight while drinking pitchers of coffee and dining on a cubic foot of baked beans, nine-egg omelettes and half a pig each, nipples and all.
This is the photo I took of the frost shadows outside the Glenorchy Bar and Restaurant.

You are all plebians

A while ago I began to notice a tendency for writing longer comments on other people's posts than the actual posts I was writing. So I vowed that next time I was inspired by someone else's blog, instead of plopping my long-windyness on their blog, I would pollute, ahem, fertlise my own.





On the thread for my last post, which received more comments than things I post which contain actual words, Adam Y chortled knowingly at my threat to begin writing about internet comics in order extinguish the last remnants of my readers (Adam himself is an internet comictission). I don't use this threat lightly. I know what poison comics are to readerships and also the frustration of trying to explain how good they really are.

I used to write a shitload of articles for my uni newspaper, and they were mostly really well received - the editors would tell me what a good job I was doing, people would stop me and tell me they liked my article, girls would offer me much sex in these elaborate fantasies I would concoct in between wanking and writing more articles for the paper ... except for the one week when I submitted an article giving a brief run-down on my favourite internet comics of the day.
Silence.
Utter silence.
"Did you get my article?"
"Yep."
"Oh."
"Anything else?"
"Um ... did you like it? What did you think?"
"It was good."
"Right..."



People are boringly short-sighted when it comes to comics. I'm bloody serious when I say that they're better than poetry, because they ARE poems, but they're illustrated, which makes them more difficult to do than simply being able to type and they're funny, which makes them much much more difficult than droning on about daffodils or broken hearts or the war. They're a fusion of two very difficult-to-master talents: art and comedy. Internet comics add another fortifying dimension to this duo that can be found in the mantra of every half-way successful internet comic: update regularly. In other words: keep working. Any artist experiencing any kind of success is doing so because they practise their art every single day. That's what makes them so good - just take a look at PhD or Penny Arcade. This is true art people!

But, I know I'm not preaching to the choir - I'm preaching to the frigging dust bins outside. I was so excited when my copy of the Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker turned up in the Amazon box the size of a microwave oven that I told everyone I saw. Blank stares. If I had bragged about receiving the Complete Collection of Type Faces I would have at least garnered a few interested questions, such as: "What's that?" and maybe "How did you get in here?"

Years ago, a whole bunch of close friends and I were out to see a movie. We were a group who had grown up together - close-knit, caring, loving, sharing. We are at the ticket counter, deciding which picture to see. One is a ye olde period piece about knights'n'jousting made by Hollywood, the other is an animated feature film. That pack of morons were actually about to lay down cash to go into A Knight's Tale, simply because the other movie was a cartoon. You know - kiddy stuff? I literally had to barricade the Knight's Tale box office with my body and force those brainless boobs I call my closest allies to go and see Shrek. Was I wrong? Sadly, this is a trick question, because I was not wrong and if you answered "Yes, you were wrong, you should have let those poor dears in to see Heath Ledger smashing up other dandy's lances to modern rock music", then you are also a foolish person and are wrong.

Shrek brought subversive pop culture to the mainstream in a way that The Simpsons have done for years and that Disney never could or will. It was highly referential - everything from WWF to Indiana Jones to Eddie Murphy's Delerious made it in there. They called a main character Fuckwad in a movie rated for children and got away with it. And yet, cartoons are still seen as simple childish mush.
Cartoons and comics haven't been childish mush since 1990 when Homer first throttled Bart, along any relevance Hanna-Barbara had to do with anything.

But back to my beloved comics. They shall be studied - mark my words - they shall be studied as microcosms of meaning and humour for many years to come.




















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GTH - No one is losing any points for stabs in the dark. However - no one is gaining any points for guessing flags either. Adam Y takes away the points for his hilarious story about punching himself in the face.

Youtube and Tennis II

It's a little embarrassing to realise that I'm repeating myself year after year on this blog. Just about everything I'm putting into this post I replicated last year. It's also worth noting that I was completely wrong about Gael Monfils. I haven't heard anything from him since.

Anyhow ... First, the prediction. More the comment. If you are a Leyton Hewitt fan, then here is a video of the first bloke to beat him in straight sets in Melbourne since 2000. If you think Spewy is a little prick who deserves to have the pants whooped off of him, then this is, curiously, also a video for you. I give you the number three seed: Novak Djokovic.



Jim Courier is still around and I think I've solved last year's Cool Commentator or Crass Cockhead Conundrum. He is both. He is an annoying, sexist, American jock. Oversexed, overorange and over here. However, having listened to John Alexander, Todd Woodbridge and Aussie Drongo Number Three tittering and chortling over the women's doubles last night, I must say that I preferred Courier's cheeky, know-it-all and often bizarrely surreal commentary. Yes, Dad, he is American, but his input to the coverage is many times more entertaining and bearable than our national old farts whose idea of interesting is to repeat over and over again how hard the 'girls' hit the ball as though it were a revelatory insight. You could hear them stuffing their fists in their mouths when the super slo-mo camera showed a chest-high shot of Molik hitting the ball. At least Jim would have covered the comment-less silence like the Pro he is. Probably with something like: "Hur hur, boobies." And thus does my point stand. Entertaining and knowledgeable!