Sunny Breaks

Been down in the country lifting things, a little whipper-snippering and teaching big ears to print digital images, which I can safely say would be more exhausting than a whole day of chainsawing. Man there’s a lot of throat-clearing goes on in that household. At one stage we were in the laundry fixing a washing machine. Bigs was under it, grunting away with a spanner, I was leaning against it, keeping it tilted over and just absent-mindedly glancing around the room. I got to gazing at a bunch of bras on top of a washing-basket pile and thinking something like how it’d been a long time since I’d seen bras lying around like that.
Sometimes the women in that family seem so odd to what I know that it’s like they’re from another planet. They’re so girly-girl-girl, but at the same time, in a way that’s hard to knock. Maybe it’s just a country thing — women do women-things and men do men-things.

There’s three girls who I mostly knew as little angel-haired kids – 12 or 15 years ago. Now they’re grown/growing up, as tall as me, still all-blonde and really attractive but all straight as straight can be. Not a rebellious bone amongst ‘em. It’s like their parents are sweden: not Cuba but still fairly progressive and so, there’s never gonna be an uprising of the working-class in sweeden, and those girls ain’t never gonna get into [insert stuff that’s offensive to the older generation].

Hey how’s this for a nice troll. I didn’t even realise I was doing it, I just spouted off this email to one of the free community papers: “Less Flouride, More Apples — Page 8, (News, October 13) tooth decay in Geelong kids, page 10, kid eating fatty, sugar-filled doughnut. Join the dots. We don’t need flouride, we need to be encouraging kids to eat apples, not doughnuts. If the Make-a-Wish foundation had any conscience regarding kids’ health, they wouldn’t be accepting public relations-driven donations from American franchises like Doughnut King. Do we want our kids to be as fat as American kids?”

I didn’t bother to look to see if it’d been printed, I thought it was too crazy. But one of the dance-gang members said they saw it. I don’t know how I managed to fit in trashing so many with so few words: flouride, DK, americans, fat kids, fat american kids, franchises and the make-a-wish foundation. Go me. I even squeezed in my own ‘Eat More Apples’ agenda. Although it comes off as sounding like flouride actually does help teeth, when it doesn’t. It’s rat poison.
I think there’s some potential there to get up on the board, become a raconteur/marching-mob leader surfing a wave of discontent — the answer to everything being the scapegoating of fat people.

A few weeks back I started back doing this voluntary work that I used to do 5 years ago. One morning a week at a music program working with retards. The semantics thing is a conundrum. While I wouldn’t say that directly to them (because they wouldn’t dig where I was coming from), I think it’s a more honest term than ‘mentally disabled’ which still sounds condescending to me. And if they’re retarded then so am I, and so is everyone I’ve come to know to one extent or other.
Just on words, and the shying away fromt them, I even heard on the radio that the Spastic Society is now calling itself something abstract like ‘seaside’. I was thinking of doing like those domain name scavengers and scooping up the registration for the ‘the spastic society’ name and doorknocking for donations in aid of me living comfortably and doing performances of acting even more of a spastic than I do normally, a la my favourite ever film, The Idiots.

Anyway, they are amazing people I jam with. They all look and act uniquely, which is right up near the top of various compliments I could give people. I was standing in a shop waiting for food recently and was looking down at some gloosy goss. magazine cover. Sharon Stone had recieved a face lift. There was a before and after picture.

As an aside, Before and After pictures never fail to grab my attention — either those puzzle drawing ones or those profit-driven ‘progress’ fotos. Really, life is just a series of before and after-images; the most recent version in memory store and what is.

Anyway, I couldn’t help but reminded how upsidedown majority-society is when the goal is to look less and less unique. Maybe it could be argued that my spazzy friends are imprefect but I reckon they’re beautiful.
There was something I read about human reactions to robots/artificial intelligence and our quest to create things as close to human as possible.
It was saying that the closer an AI came to emulating humaness, the less people liked it, because the easier it was to compare the robot to yourself, the more achingly obvious the artificialness of the robot. However, the robots that were way off left this big gap where people used imagination to fill in the human aspect of the robot, which worked heaps better. I think the example used was R2D2 and C3P0 as the latter case.

That’s how I feel about the mashing up and re-landscape architecting of faces in the name of achieving perfect symmetry. There’s no such thing as a straight line or exact balance in the physical world.

There’s one guy who when he really starts getting into, he jumps up and starts doing ‘the Swim’, which really rocks. I just wish i hadn’t sold all me frikkin’ bass guitars.

Went bowling again. Personal-bested at 111. It’s all in the swingback. Eventhough I know this I still can’t do it consistently. And if there’s any benefits from the physically activity involved in bowling, it’s all easily undone with a small coke. I asked if we were a league team what would we be called. Jimbo says “hehe. That’s what we’d be called. ‘Hehe’”. I suggested Stoner Classix on account of the other two.

There was a ten Y.O.‘s birthday party further down the lanes. Lots of bright hawaiian shirts, high-fives and enthusiastic cheering. There was one kid wearing blue sunglasses the whole time. I thought that was pretty cool. One of them ran over and asked GG and jimbo, “How do you make it go down there so fast? At 80 k’lomtres an hour!?”

Towards the end the place went disco on us. They tuned on the runway landing lights and started showing footage of beheadings, or Video Hitz — I couldn’t tell which.

I was thinking, what if it’d never occurred to us for mail to mainly words written on paper, and instead small birds were sent. Small birds deposited in mail boxes. You’d go open it carefully, get a little finch enclosed in your fist and gently pat its head with your thumb while heading back into the house. There’d be signs on letterboxes like, ‘No Junk Budgies Please’, or ‘Registered Australia Post Canaries only’. I don’t know about the conveying useful information bit. I suppose you’d have to guess who it was from and what it was about.

I’m really into throat-clearing. I’ve been doing it alot myself and happily noting to myself the behaviour when I observe others do it. Because of People Like Us who have a good helping of throat-clearing in their tracks. There’s also a track mostly made up of people going, “um”, called Dolly Pardon. People Like Us is easily the best new thing I’ve come across this year. The music is extremely rich and the man form mars in my head made me listen to it all for a week straight in attempt to grok all the samples; their origins and why they were there.
The other week I rang up DJ 2 on the radio to ask if he’d heard of them and he said, “Yeah I know Vicki. They were out here about three years ago”.

The other day i was at the fruit and veg. store and the person in front of me was buying some stuff, including 3 small, loose mushrooms. I’ve never seen such a non-committal purchase of mushrooms. I love mushrooms. I am one. I buy a whole big bag everytime I go. They’re only $3.99 where I go.

My mother’s stopped reading this website. She said it was becoming tired and predictable and not edgy. I said, mum, nobody says edgy anymore. Shows how much you know, she said. I was talking to her on the telephone and she got some new glasses, with magnetic clip on sunglasses. This means there will be no need to wear two pairs of glasses at the same time anymore. She used to do that all the time, and everywhere — normal glasses on, then big sunglasses on over the top. When you looked you could see the second pair in there. It was such a regular thing that it never really struck me as being dead-set weird.

Last Sunday the psychotic fuck next door cut my phone wire. He has some real anger-mangement issues. A creeper hedge from our yard had made it onto his roof, and instead of asking, ‘hey would you mind trimming your hedge?’‘ he got up on the fence, screaming, quaking with rage, with a pair of long-handled secatuers and hacked it to bits, taking out my connection in the process.
I spent quite a while on listening to the Optus on-hold phone music loop monday morning and a guy came out and fixed it that afternoon. How about a big hand for russell, linesman for the county? I was half expecting it to take a week or something.
Higgins was going to try and get psycho to pay for it — not much chance of that happening. But Optus are going to foot it because it shouldn’t have been running along the top of the fence in the first place.

Oh god dear reader I’m sorry my proofreading is so shit. I suppose I’m just not one of those people that can do that. I made all kinds of excuses for myself, like my fingers not being good at targeting the keys accurately or being hampered by the size of this little box that I type into but really it’s just me.
If education is the new Church then I thank the local cathedral for not accepting me for their job. I’m no good at it and somehow they had the divine foresight to know it _{boo-hoo, boohoo, o god thankyou}.
The truth is editing and fixing up mistakes, mine or other people’s bores the fuck out of me, and that’s why I don’t do it good.

I have a confession to make. Considering the painful detail in to which I retell the pathetic nothingness of my life on this here website, you’d probably be surprised to know there’s something I haven’t been letting on about for the last 16 or 17 months. Probably shame is why.

I chew gum. Bubble gum because aspartame scars the brain, but that’s another story. Hubba-bubba.
It started off a bit before the end of first semester, last year. In off-campus anchorite mode I’d get out of bed, eat a meagre breakfast then sit down here to write assignments only to find that by 11am I’d be very near to dozing off.

Caffiene? Of course that was always around but it wasn’t having any effect at all anymore. Somehow I got the idea to chew some gum, remembering that the motion of the jaw helped to keep blood flowing through the brain.
It worked. It wasn’t like some hallelujah Praise Be thing, because at that stage I was still smoking and would also duck outside for a fag which kept the blood pressure up. After I gave them up I found I was chewing a lot more.
I joked to some friends who came to visit that I thought my jaw muscles would grow enormous and mishapen, like Popeye. I was secretly very worried about this, but it didn’t happen.
Through the dark dead drag of winter and semester two I countinued with the Hubb-bubba — strawberry, apple, vanilla-cola, even blueberry when I could lay my hands on some.

I’d do stuff like incise it into two parts in my mouth, then chew in stereo so my jaw wouldn’t ache from lop-sidedness. I’d squish it into the gaps between my teeth and drag it through with my tongue. I thiink this is why there is now a visible gap between my top two front teeth, where there never was. I’d blow the odd bubble too, but mostly it was about the chewing.

It got so that one piece wasn’t enough. I’d only start out with one, but a few hours later I’d chuck a second bit in. I’d mix flavours… all kinds of shit.
I’d tell myself it because I didn’t want to get diabetes from all the sugar, but I started taking the gum out of my mouth and putting it back on its little peice of wax paper. This would only be when I had to do something as unavoidable as eating. Then … o the shame … I’d pick up the gum and starting chewing it again. The truth is, these are the bizarre and unhealthy kinds of habits that emerge when something as heinous as a gum-habit goes unchecked.

Things like this spread into my external, social life. I noticed that eventhough I was always at it when I was out, I’d never offer anyone else a piece, ‘If you wanted some, you’d get you own’, I’d think. Sitting on the dead-quiet but rather full (don’t ask; Geelong people are just like that) morning bus out to uni, chewing well-hard, two-day old gum… I’d work it up warm enough to get a bubble on, blow it and CRACK! — it’d pop like a Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band Snare drum, unsettling my dead-eyed peers in the process. It was my way of saying, Fuck You society, Fuck You Geelong, Fuck You Deakin Uni. Sociopathic is what they call it.

There’s this Jerry Seinfeld bit about how it’s basically impossible to chew gum and not look belligerent at the same time. It wasn’t until I saw someone else chewing gum in class that this occurred to me. I chewed in lectures and tutes all the time. No wonder no one approached me to say hello.
Plus there was these things I was totally unaware of, like when I had to say something for more than a sentence or two, I’d actually pop the gum out, wrap it in its little bit of paper and stuff it in my pocket. Then pull it back out ten mintues later.

I’m still chewing, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m chewing right now. I’m conscious of it. I think about it a lot.
Lately I’ve been thinking that, see, I used to have this perception of myself as having a very low threshold of amusement. It means that I can be amused by very small or simple things for an abnormally long time.
But it turns out I’m wrong.

The reality of the situation as I understand it, at this point in time, is that I’ve no idea what bores me and what doesn’t. I’m like one of those freaks who has no sense of pressure-touch in their skin nerves. Put me in a black box, turn me upside down and I wouldn’t know it. It’s like that with me and interest.
I experience no sensation as to whether something is interesting or boring. People can talk me me into thinking something is interesting — and I’ll go along with it — this happens all the time. In fact, there’s undoubtedly many things I’ve done in the past that I’ve thought were interesting but were actually really boring. Hindsight provides no clarity. There is no learning from trial and error. No progress. A flat line all the way out.
This pursuit and you, reader, bore me to death. How can I be sure this isn’t true?

I’m going to take the gum out of my mouth. If oxygen stops getting to my brain and my head falls dead onto the keyboard, then I guess you’ll figure it out. mhn uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuubnj bnm bnmfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffcr

I don’t see why so many people poo-poo totalitariansism when I can get on an evening rush hour train in the Metropolis and see at least 60% of workers reading the same piece-of-crap, free, NewsCorp-spawn “newspaper” — MX.

I wish I could enlarge/shrink my bicycle at will and when small, fit it in my ear, a la Monkey Magic.

I’d like to renew my plea to the allied invaders, please pull out of Irak to stop the continuing atrocities like this – ‘Make Mixtapes not War’. Sheesh, I only got through one of two CDs and by then was so agitated that I was ready to hook someone’s testicles up and start juicing. 42 songs from no-name, no-talent wankers, with the exception of Sandro, who I like but that was on the 2nd CD so didn’t hear it.

Truncated statements galore in the form of number plates at rice cop — most are US, of which are allowed up to 8 letters in some cases — seems like cheating compared to the max. 6 here.

The fragment name, The Chuds was floating around in my head but I didn’t know where from. The Chuds are a NY punk band who most likely grabbed their name from a movie called C.H.U.D.. I found this out after noticing that the URL thechuds.com is available and would make a good name for a Travelling Wilburies style group blog.

ug, I have a headcold snotnose.

Wandered down the platform and happened upon a vending machine. The protective steel door had been left open, either by a refiller person or some other.
After casting a glance each way, there was no other option than to take it for all it was worth. I really mean it, there was no other choice.
With pockets and underpants stuffed full of Skittles, Cherry Ripes, Snickers Mars Bars and the like, I boarded the newly arrived train.
Sat down opposite me was a chap quite wired in appearance. Head twitched about like a hen’s. This man opened a hard-shelled case and produced a one-litre carton of unflavoured milk. Holding it up he said,
“Mmmm, milk. Natural, refreshing; milk,” in a voice unecessarily loud for the compartment. He opened it and drank enthusasitically, leaving driblet-streams at the corners of his mouth.
He held it out again, this time stretched in my direction, grinning cheesily and twitching eyebrows vertically in ‘?‘ gesture. All the while those little milk-riverbeds on his chin like hinges on a wooden ventriloquists’ puppet’s mouth.

I leant forward and sniffed slightly. The milk registered as being off, and as much I said. The man’s grin dropped out. He struggled to his feet, groaning, slightly thrown by the train’s wobble, but also holding his gut as if he’d been hit with a shotgun. A bit over the top really. I’d accidentally ingested sour milk plenty of times and the effect was more of a slow-bleed over the next 12-24 hrs.
Nevertheless, after what must have been only four or five steps out into the carriage passageway, the man began to hurl shamelessly. This I heard, in full Dolby Surround.

He leveled with me %100A; in the way that only the truly desperate can.
“You gotta help me buddy, you gotta help me!”, he lunged forward and feebly attempted to grab the collar of my trench coat. The puke-breath would have been over powering, had I not been wired on Skittles.
“Settle down there, chester.. Who put you up to this?”
His head bowed and while he said nothing, his eyes gave it away, tracking back to the milk carton on the floor.

“I needed the money! Half now, half later they said. All they gave me was this case, no instructions or nothing. All they said was push the product.” He belched, looking queasy for a moment. “I haven’t slept in a week. I been riding trains nonstop. I don’t even know what country I’m in anymore.”
At this I grappled his shoulders and shook him violently. “This is Australia you idiot. There’s only one country on this continent. The happiest continent on Earth.”
“Oh…”, his eyes downcast, looking thoroughly beat now.
I got up and left the compartment, disgusted and only least by the smell.
So.
The Milk Mafia had entered the murky world of solids — one-to-one promotions.
Figures, homogenisation had taken quite a bad wrap lately.

Up until a month or two back, when Kimi won his first race for the season, I’d think to myself often, ‘well at least I’m having a better year than Kimi Raikkonen’. And much more could’ve happened, my knees could’ve seized up, bike been stolen and been set up, framed and thrown in gaol for kiddie-porn and I still would’ve been having a better year than Kimi Raikkonen.
I mean, yes, he’s was still getting paid heaps of money and probably has a fab girlfriend, but what’s the point if your car keeps blowing up. Feel like you were wasting yer time wouldn’t ye?
But can various people’s wasting of time be ordered? Is Kimi’s waste of time any more regretful than mine? Yes. Because he’s trying real hard NOT to waste it. Basically, I’m not trying either way.
Once a hairy-faced high-school librarian said to me that really, all we were all doing was wasting time until we die. And for whatever reason, that short statement had a lasting effect on how I think.

Anyway, neither of those pictures back there were me. They, along with the rest of it were what came up when googling my first/last name. It’s like x-files govt cloning experiment meets Geneology Monthly magazine, but we’re all located on the east coast of this continent, and mostly in this state, and agewise within 20years.
I know those kids in sydney would beg to differ, and maybe it’s because I don’t unnerstand the rules, but I can’t see where talent is in bending over and running head-first into another person. And so, even when I was six I doubt I’d be caught dead getting fotographed with a rugby player.
No, the only ‘sports’ I can be bother with are where an obscene amount of fossil fuel is lit, potentially millions of dollars of hardware is smashed to bits, plus the odd firey death. Motorsport.
And while formula one this year has been like watching two red-painted planks drying in the sun, next year might be funner.

My two favourite drivers will be in the same team – Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Montoya. They are such spoilt brat-man and I think it’s great. I saw this brief bit of footage this year of how some cameraman with one of those hefty TV-quality jobs on his shoulder swung around and accidentally whacked Montoya in the side of the head with the lens. Juan covered his head in hands more out of shock than pain then went to hit the cameraman, but his girlfriend stopped it. Juan’s press conferences are quite special too, he’s got this special brand of uncomfortable. He’s got a very girlish look to his features, does Juan.
And then there’s Kimi, who I’ve mentioned before. Everytime his car’s blown up, he’s crawled out there onto the grass beside the race track, body-size diminished by the helmet, wondering what the heck he’s doing with his life. Then track-safety marshals rush over, and there must be something about Kimi in distress because they can’t help but put a hand on his shoulder. The message they invariably get back is, like that Groove Armada song – Don’t touch me! – and he shoves them in the chest. Kimi loves the shove.

I want to write a road/buddy movie with Juan and Kimi in. They’ll drive through the country, resentful of eachother’s company, alternately offending and being offended by local yokels.

There’s a lot of things I could say and it’s taken me a couple of days to decide which ones I’d say. I’ve decided not to say anything at all.
Except that once upon a time there was a people who yearned so hard for the status quo that they made the mistake of leaving open a yard gate so that a rabid rottweiler could get in and tear apart the fuzzy bunnies of status quo. Even if the big dog had personal feelings of not wanting to tear apart the rabbits, the fact that the gate had been left open meant that it had to wreak havoc.
There was also some small children whose natural instinct was to protect the fuzzy bunnies. They would beat at and be mangled by the dog — so ultimately there’d be the complete opposite of status quo. The problem is, there’s no such thing as a status quo, there’s only going back and going forward.

But regardless of which way things are going, for today at least, I can still sit underneath some of those native pine trees (that I can’t remember the proper name for) and enjoy the sound of the wind in them like the sea in a conch shell.
And the bastards can’t stop me from subverting the results of their actions — their warplane’s vapour trail at night is a mysterious and awe-full sight.

Thanks to that illegal art collection I mentioned back here, I came across this musician person, Vicki Bennett, who goes by the name of People Like Us. A description of the sound: like Julie Andrews and the rest of the Sound of Music family were repalced with electronic replicants who keep glitching and segfaulting. “The H-h-h-h-Hi-hi-hi-hillzz-zzz-zz-zzzzz-z—z are-are-are-are-are…..” etc. Another description is a crazy person got hold of your 45s, your parents’ LPs and your grandparents’ 78s, smashed them all up with a hammer and glued all the bits back together higgledy-piggledy.
I really like it, I like it a lot, but listening to a more than half an hour in one go is like when you and a couple of friends decide to twirl around on the spot all lunchtime, and it goes pretty well but once you stop you feel kind of sick for the rest of the afternoon.

People Like Us’ latest album, Abridged Too Far, is completely available on the internet and only available on the internet.
I have a lot of respect for philosophies like this – (from the downloads page)
“We strongly believe in the power of profit through free distribution, and the publicity that comes along with that – so we are putting our money where our mouse is. Often people have never heard of an artist because they aren’t being distributed through as many channels as they should be, due to the very poor state of music/media distribution for non-major label music coupled with ignorance of the way that avant garde art forms infiltrate mainstream culture. Also many prints of a work are allowed to go out of circulation or are deleted for no reason other than cost effectiveness by a label/publisher. This makes perfect sense financially, but no sense whatsoever that a year’s work by an artist should also disappear for such reasons. So get all of this while you can, and we completely endorse getting one’s work out there, no matter what. If you don’t share, your profit is limited.”

An added bonoid of these clicks was running across Ubuweb, which is a large audio archive of old excellent poetry, weird stuff and they even re-anchored the 365 days project from last year, so all that stuff is easily getable again! Bingo! Ubuweb, I love you.

I think Tony might’ve had a link to this ages ago but I just came across it last night. The Demotivators Collection I think, of all the people on my link-list, Cybbis would like these the most.
Some of the lines are pretty damn sharp, in fact I’m going to pinch a couple for the random.txt here.
Defeat: for every winner, there are dozens of losers, odds are you’re one of them.
Procrastination: Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.
Stupidity: Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots.
Insanity: It’s difficult to comprehend how insane some people can be. Especially when you’re insane.

On that last one I read a Charlie Manson quote in a magazine, “You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody’s crazy”. Right on Charlie.

Wow, it’s strange how in some respects a year can slip around quite quickly: It’s the ’04 Crop Circle

Round-Up. Battle through the quaint old html and banner ads to have a squiz at this year’s, er, crop. I repeat, I don’t know who’s saying it, and I don’t know what they’re trying to say, but for Pete’s sake, please make them look more interesting next time. Yawn!
Also, swirled news, for all your terribly nerdy and peculiarly english crop circle news, including in-fighting among the ‘Plankers’. That’s what they do in england, make patterns, make tapes of eating chips then leave it on the bus, and take to the pocket calculator with a power drill to see if any neat image will form in the LCD.

Or at least that’s what Beflix does. So odd that he had to go on the link list.

- Interesting bit at adland about how SMS hasn’t really taken off in the US.

- SMS joke-writing sweatshop in China:
“The message goes like this – A little mosquito returns home distraught. His mother asks him why he’s crying. “Didn’t you father take you to see a show?” “Yes,” he replies, “But he forgot to fly away when the audience started to applause!” Receiving text messages like this one is a daily occurrence in China.” — from here.

— “Millions of people have realised that the quickest and easiest way to lay the groundwork for a relationship is through text flirting. Don’t get left behind, get on your mobile and go for it!” — from here.
        Yes that’s right, YOU! No time to ponder the implications of this behaviour, just do it!

– A study into the Insights into the Social and Psychological Effects
of SMS Text Messaging.
In a nutshell, ‘Talkers’ are more likely to be normal, while ‘Texters’ are the same kind of creepazoids you run into in internet chatrooms.

- Article looking at the semiotics of texting.

— “Word Spy subscriber Ravi Subramanian has suggested that another name for this type of medical condition ought to be “repetitive press injury.” Thumbs up!” — here.

There’s a bunch of English public information films here. They’re in Real media format and not fantastic quality but it’s cheaper than buying the dvd.

This chappy has some quite nice computer generated images. Yes, quite nice. Look, but for goodness sakes don’t touch.

The first couple of times I stood in that queue and had my poise gathered up about me, looking sharp and feeling like I’m looking sharp and she said, “Can I help you?”, I’d turn in her direction and look her in the eye. She was goodlooking, I’ll tell you that much for free, but for someone who seemed as emotionally cooled-out as Dr.Spock she was pretty easy to read.
As I approached, she’d do this adjusting the glasses thing; a certain way of lifting them off the nose, the way a thumb and finger are positioned at either edge of a framed lens. Lifted up, set down in a place marginally higher on the bridge of the nose. The lens thickness was such that, to me, there was the illusion of eyeball ripple due to magnification.
It was this habit that gave me the idea that she at least recognised me and might even say yes if I asked her to go kite-flying with me.
Not that I thought it would be a fun or quote-unquote “romantic” thing to do, it’s just that for reasons best not gone into, I needed to go K-Fing and had literally run out of people I knew who would agree to come along. I’d get hoisted by winds and land on busy roads or roofs too tricky to get off of, unless there was a 2nd person’s weight involved.

I have to say, each time I stood there at that counter sneaking glimpses at her so severely drawn back hair and beady eyes, I became a little more intrigued.
Her voice wasn’t what I would’ve expected – a little higher than that – and the way my head measures voice in spectrum pegged hers at yellow, and the texture of cheese without having anything else to do with cheese. I am highly effected by voice, and while hers was not great I could deal with it.

Coffee at her house: Boy was I hangin’ for that cuppa tea. It was mid-afternoon and I was in real danger of falling asleep, head dropping onto the formica kitchen-table top right then n’ there. It mostly was a very normal house, very clean, ordered. She stood there aside the kettle like a gameshow model as it came to. But instead of filling the two awaiting cups, she glided along a little further and, pouring from a height, tipped the water into the sinkhole. She made this hideous screeching-pain noise while doing it, which was explained to be the noise that the pipe-dwelling bacteria and other flora would make when they got a taste of that boiling water.
“It’s a jungle down there”, she said.
“Whoah. Did you swipe a load of liberry books or what?” I asked, looking at a long book case through some smoked-glass, sliding doors.
No answer.
“Then why do they all have labels on them like library books?”
“Let me tell you about a brilliant young man named Melvil Dewey. The year was 1876…”

Coffee at my house: I’d be lying to you if I were to use the expression, ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell her that…’. More like, Telling the truth would ruin my plans, so I didn’t mention how I’d never understood the Dewey Decimal system, and often wondered why they didn’t just arrange it all like in Fiction — with the author’s names in alphabetical order.
Further to that, as we walked up the street to where I lived I remembered that I’d sorted my bookcases according to the colour on the spines. I panicked and decided to break into someone else’s house and pretend it was mine. I said I’d forgot my key and would pop ‘round the back to open the front door for her in a tick.
I pulled it off pretty well considering I didn’t know where anything was. After a little well-masked fumbling about I had beverages poured and was pleased with how things were going.
I spied a jar labelled ‘biscuits’, pulled it off the shelf, whipped the lid off and looked down in.
“Would you like a … Chips? … Ahoy?“

In a beautiful place out in the country: That summer evening we sat picnicking on the chronically chemically abrased buffalo grass, in the cool, sweet shade of the refinery stacks. The main incineration chimney’s flame got a hold of something specially toxic and shifted from orange to blue, a special kind of blue that the two of us could share for those short moments.
Maybe it was ‘cause of the oily vapour from the catalytic cracker, or maybe it was the Dewey-induced fervour that she kept on yabbering with – order, structure, purpose – but her eyes gleamed, and gleamed.
I looked into those eyes – through the goggles, at those flat 2-dimensional, brown irises and I knew sadly that she could never be any more than kite ballast to me. ah.

I am the web host tech-support dude’s worst nightmare. After 3 years of paying for a webspace, I’ve recently moved on to my fourth host (that sound kind of macabre huh).
The thing is, I spend a ridiculous amount of time online, mostly just basking in my self-constructed glory ie. my website. And so, the upshot is that I always know when it’s having technical difficulties. I email tech support; “Why is my website not working? Where is my website? I can’t see my website yet. Why haven’t you fixed my website?” … and so on.

And even though I haven’t got to it yet, you might wonder why I’d plug my current webhost after just experiencing a couple of days of downtime. The truth is, everybody has technical trouble sometimes. Even IBM. The big difference was that this time, on ZainyFX, Sydney Multimedia Solutions Web Design Web Hosting Logo Design – ZainyFX ::: Multimedia Solutions, the problem was rectified and serious action was taken to make sure it never happens again.
Compare this to the last webhost i paid money to: they wouldn’t answer my emails, and then they actually started lying to me. I felt like i was trying to talk to a robot, except that they don’t lie.

That was two months ago, and i was desperately looking for a new space to transfer my website to. Enter ZainyFX. I saw a google text ad for it. I was well seasoned at being disappointed with webhosts, and had a long list of requirements sought after in a prospective host. That list was, it had to be 1) zainy, 2) have fx [or ‘effects’ if you want to be pedantic], 3) start off its spiel with the words, “Here at _____ we understand that finding ______ _____ ______ for you and your business … ”.

Bingo! I was in luck on all three counts. The truth is it was just good luck that I picked Zainy. First and foremost, the tech-support guy, Carl, is a human and communicates like one — this really helps. The prices are reasonable: stability is worth paying for. The server runs on apache, which is a bonus in anyone’s language.
It has the best control panel I’ve ever seen! and I’ve seen a few. cPanel – has everything: here is a picture of part of the control panel, and i still couldn’t fit everything in -> that’s how much there is

There’s a shopping cart thing if you want to sell stuff, mailing lists if you have thousands of fans, more stats programs than you could poke a pocket protector at, and even a hot-link protection thing that can stop people from stealing your bandwidth.

Anyway, ZainyFX is currently in merger talks with another small australian company, Bold Echidna — and I can only hope that the resulting business name will be Zainy Echidna.