A slow day at the office. There’s all these extra empty offices at my ma’s workplace and I’m here waiting around for the afternoon train, pretending to be an office worker, goofing off. Ma’s doing that too – it’s a slow office week ‘cause the boss isn’t around.
Man, there’s so many retards in Colac. Honestly, you can’t tell the difference between the ones who’ve slipped through the system, and the ones that got institutionalised. There’s this big institution out on the outskirts of town. I did werkexperience there for a week in yr.10. It was okay. They bought me a Fanta.
We went out for dinner last night and the place was full of spazzies. I’m sure it’s not a thing of perception on my part. If they’re not that then they’re stoners or angry cops — that’s all there is in this town. I got told this story ages ago that when cops get reprimanded, they get transferred to colac. I don’t need to rely on anecdotal evidence for any of those demographic sectors.

It didn’t make it for chrismaz, but my stocking filler book is now available. K’Plah! – the quiet revolution; Klingonasse is taking over our language system by Mitch Andrews. It details how changes to English as we know it won’t be the obvious ones like death of apostrophe or decimation of vowels: tts what its all abt. No, – I go back to the first utterings of Klingon in star trek 3, the search for spock. And from there how the conception was taken up by unfamous but dilligent nerds who constructed a full language and disseminated it through the world via books.
The causal pivot and success to the venture was its arrival co-inciding with the rise of the internet – ’94—> and with people like those google nerds helping the movement along – reference.
The book concludes on how language is the harbinger of a greater change; not long ago the only place you’d see people dressed up as Klingons is at conventions or possibly Las Vegas. Now, you can be reading through an everday magazine about food & drink and come across a photo of a ‘normal’ sitting in a canteen with a couple of Klingons. Indeed, visiting my local supermarket the other day I went to the eight items or less check-out where the cashier greeted me with a grimace, hiss and two rows of teeth filed to sharpened points.

Wow, I could get used to being an office werker if this is all there is. Computer’s nice too.

“If our eyes were able to sense the waves of invisible radiation now emanating from the innumerable communications and other electronic sources, we would be immeresed in a shimmering haze. Shafts of more intense light would streak, like searchlights, across the scene from radio, TV and radar towers. If these phantom lights left their marks as colour stains we would, no doubt, have been more cautious about intruding them into the environment and our lives.” – Les Dalton

I got a few minutes to check out ACMI yesterday, but nowhere long enough. The theme is sight. I was just about to leave as a piece showing on one of the larger screens rolled credits: to Van McCoy’s discoruisy “Do The Hustle” was footage of airliners crashing – and no not twin towers —man that whole thing really stuffed things up, after that I couldn’t tell people I really dug watching footage of planes crashing without being chased from the building. I mean – that german airshow one where it just didn’t get high enough and trimmed a bunch of connifers with its wings, disappeared from view and reappeared as a fireball. Or the one where they deliberately crashed one for safety and fun.

Uhuh, I feel like I should explain the superwhite link. Before crizmaz listening to the radio – a wrap up and snippets of interviews from the year of a show I don’t listen to. I heard a song by this guy Jim White, on David Byrne’s label – it didn’t stand out at all. But then he was talking about how he was once talking to this friend, a black woman about how some whiteys try be black thru wearing clothes and affectations and it only made them look pathetic, so Jim White says that he thinks he can attain some kind of blackness through being really really white. So, you’re going to be ‘superwhite’ huh? He replies, yes. And thinks, who is the epitome of really really white? Some nervous, skinny awkward fella… like David Byrne — and Jim resolves that if he ever sees David Byrne, he’ll yell Superwhite! out at him.
Some time later Jim White is living in new york city, doing the Travis thing: mohawk, driving taxi —and while prowling around in the cab, happens to see Byne walking on the foot path. He crusies up alongside and yells, hollers “Superwhite!” but gets no reaction.
Then, some time later someone sends Jim White’s demo tape to LuakaBop and eventually Jim white ends up sitting in a room with david byrne being told that they’d like to sign him.

It was a great story – funny, well told. The kind of thing that’d make me go back and have another listen to the music.
As opposed to another interview – with the guy from Smog – which was terrible. He didn’t want to be talking at all, but couldn’t be botherd actually saying so.

I can’t believe some hippy chick from the ‘hood bought my couch. No tv here now either – sitting on the floor with piles of trash on the floor and a mattress, also on the floor. Feels like squatting.

- The only good elton john song is that ‘for guy’ song. If I had a band I’d cover it – either guitars or electronic would work. It’d also be great to commit suicide to.

- I spoke too soon about the zip on my jeans – it’s really stuffed. O why hast thou forsaken me? I got some more jeans from an op-shop today.

- My sloth bites me on the arse, ass, airse. I think after this, it’ll be a standing policy that when I’m moving out of a rented place, I’ll just runaway before the final inspection and deal with what ever negative-karma comes from it.

- I didn’t mention it here, but several months ago I had a convo with exgirlfriend jean who was still in East Timor. If it’d been an instant message to-and-fro it would’ve looked like this:

Exg/f jean: I met Xanana today. All I could think of was I’m standing here talking to the president, wearing flip-flops.
And well… Guess What?! I’m pregnant! I found out a few months ago and am due in late March. What do you think?
esquimaux pie: Hey wow. That’s great. I’m really happy for you.
Say, when you spoke too Xanana, did you happen to mention my icecream sundae idea to him. Because, y’know, if he’d be willing to appear in a tv ad we could cut him in for a nice chunk of the earnings.
Exg/f jean: wtf?

Ah, not really — if it’d been an IM conversation the punctuation would’ve not been anywhere near as thorough as that.
But I remember once on KUI reading about how there’s all these euphemisms in English; up the duff, in the family way, bun in the oven, knocked up, eating for two, exhibiting signs of man-juice infection and so on (I wish I could think of some more – they’re great) while in France it’s simply kown as being pregnant.
Am having lunch with xg/fJ tomorrow. I’m secretly hoping she eats all the food in the restaurant and they have to close the restaurant. I am happy for her though.

The Red Shoes

: Do you have Red Shoes and do you love them more than anything else including god, your feet, telling the truth and going to church? If so, take a picture and send it in along with a little anecdote or explanation and help us celebrate Red Shoes-love.
But why stop there? If you see someone on the street wearing Red Shoes, don’t be shy! Go ask them for a foto of their fabbo footwear. What a great way to make friends :)
Send to: yaksox@gmail.com

Exit-Bowl — If you want to come along, this friday arvo around three at the Northcote Bowlarama – because I’m leaving the continent.

Y’know, I lost my 2dollar sunnies at the festival, and the fly zipper on my jeans got wrecked. I got my undies caught in it. I had to walk around the whole two days with it middle-positioned so it didn’t look so obvious.
Yesterday while getting a load of washing together I was looking at them in a sorrowful beat kind of way, like Chewbacca in Empire… when he’s examining the ripped apart bits of C3-PO. I mused to myself that what if I wished or prayed really hard then maybe they’d fix up — what if I stress. I dragged the zippy bit right down to the bottom then tried bringing it up again, and lo! – it worked.

I don’t know why, but I feel unusually unaffected by the tsunami situation. Why is is that one person can be really torn up inside about it and the next feel nothing? I don’t know. I don’t feel nothing. I feel something. I’m not watching much news lately which may have something to do with it.
Does it matter that the reasoning doesn’t follow conventional logic – where good things can be attributed to a god, but bad things – well that’s just life.
And even at the point of death – if those people realised that everything would be alright for them and they were being delivered into something else greater or whatever — I could totally understand if they were still a bit sad about going — because maybe they had some project on the go that would’ve been good to finish, like a jigsaw puzzle.

Maybe a month ago now that cat of mum’s went walkabout and didn’t come back. Every cat has its foil; food, sex, drugs, roughhousing, hunting et cetera and this one’s was definitely food. We guess it probably ate somethin’ it shouldn’t have and died in a field. Either that or it got abducted by aliens. Or maybe it was an alien and was homesick.
Y’know there’s this theory based on how a lot of stuff – like cultivatable grains and veges etc. came about too quickly when measured up against what the evolution-science-mafia mob say. “Oh, selective planting huh? Yeah right.” – that’s what the ‘intelligent design’ people say. They’re not creationists, more along the lines of the earth was seeded by a more ancient race.

I don’t know if they’re right but when I look at a lot of mammals they seem so odd and different and I fancy they each came from different planets, like a horse planet, seal and dog planets, cow planet and definitely an elephant planet.
One day a long time ago, 1970s and ancient Egypt, cats in their flying saucer came into orbit and scanned the planet. They looked at the humans and knew that if they wanted to, they could come live here because they knew the humans were partial to soft, furry mostly floppy things. So they did. “We Go Where We Please” – that’s their motto.

Also, the little dog that I claimed was a stock photo of a little dog in this post wasn’t. It was actually a friend’s little dog. About two months ago it got mauled by a larger dog. He loved that little dog, he’d pick it up and nurse it like the Duchess and the baby pig.

My mum was dropping sis off at the train station and there were these scungy kittens running around the joint. My sis said chase it get it or something like that but they didn’t. Mum tried not to sqwash any when leaving the station — and she didn’t — but when she pulled up at the servo she looked around and there was the same kitten. Just like Sideshow Bob, as she rightly pointed out, it’d somehow attached itself to the bottom of the beat-up beat-down ’85 volvo stationvagen. Ma took this to be a sign and took the kitten home. It’s ugly as all fuck, apparently.

Best christmas song that nobody ever plays: another lonely christmas by Prince.

I would do one of those best albums of the year thingies except that I don’t remember if I’ve actually listened to any albums that were made this year. When it comes to figuring that stuff out it’s like I’m permanently on drugs. I just found out I had Neil Young’s Harvest Moon on LP – I don’t know how long it’s been there.
It probably wasn’t made this year, but it did make quite an impression on me — Richard Cheese‘s Lounge Against the Machine album. I mention this because I surprise myself that I like it, I mean, I’d sooner stab myself iin the ear drums than listen to Limp Bizkit, Blink 182 or Offspring — but the reinterpretation of their songs in a caberet style impresses me in a way that I could really make sound good if I could only remember all that academic jive lingo I learnt in communication studies.

It’s just very catchy and singable. If I had to get up and do a kareoke number, I’d sing the dick cheese version of Guerilla Radio.

Well it’s just been a fucking madhouse around here of late so team sunny breaks unfortunately can’t be offering the usual level of carefully planned caustic wit n’ bleak humour.
Been packing stuff and trying to flog off some. Does anyone wanna buy my desktop computer – it’s got everything, 1000megahertz never driven above 766. I sold some of the more pulpy books that hadn’t come out of boxes since the last move and have come to the conclusion that 2nd hand bookshop proprietors are nothing more than glorified (glory! glory!) pawnshop scuzzballs.

My buddy Obs is going to take over my paper route. You’d never think that a guy who’d lived under a vow of silence for 4 years would be interested in that job, but it just goes to show, it’s no ordinary paper run. He came along the other morning which was heaps of fun. After the fourth week of doing it I could’ve done it sleepwalking ie. plenty of time to think, and I’ often thought about what kind of tips I’d pass on to an apprentice re the art and technique of slotting.

I’ve been in this ‘enjoy the stuff I’ll miss’ over-compensation thing and have been listening to old LPs.
Team Sunny Breaks’ man on the ground in S.Korea emailed the other day and said that he won’t be able to meet me at the airport “because it’s too much of a hassle”. I started to kirk out way ahead of time about the thought of getting on the wrong fucking bus or something. The old noggin’s been whirring and at night it don’t stop. Always trains — whenever life speeds up I get train dreams. And this weird helicopter one: a police helicopter lands in my parents’ yard — then it’s actually a police woman in uniform with a cap on that had rotors and controls sticking out of it. She was having a hard time getting relaunched because of wind shear and a tight window above due to power lines so the whole family gives her a boost into the air.

And then I wake up and the record player in my brain cues up ‘puppy love’ by Paul Anka. Crikey! I haven’t listend to these things in three or more years, why now? It’s just throwing me more out of kilter. Although I do like You Are My Destiny.

I bought an older apple laptop yesterday, like the one in this picture. It’s mostly okay. It took all day for them to give to me — applebits.net.au isn’t quite worth linking to because there’s no damn modem port in the side of the thing – wha?! You know where you put that phone jack/plug, with the little hinge and it makes that satisfying snib sound — there’s just a hole where there should be a socket that helps make a snibby sound. It’s got an airport card in it (wireless thingy) but now that I think about it, I don’t think there’s a single coffeeshop/food joint in Geelong that has wireless usage for patrons.
Let me tell you, I can think of a few better places to spend the day wandering around than Oakleigh in Melbourne’s south-east.
I’m sure the modem port thing was just a simple ommision but it means I’ve got to go back there and at the thought of that I say, “Baby Goats!”.

Just for the record, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the last webhost S.Breaks was at, Zainy, it’s just that HostCentral has helped me get a significant way toward the the point of this website being financially self-sufficient and for this I am grateful. Now if only it could write itself (via Dabs) then I could forget about it completely.

Part of the reason for my lack-lustreness for hoiking up a bunch of links to stuff is because of the StumbleUpon, www.stumbleupon.com, toolbar thing. It takes the effort and value out of presenting a bunch of obscure seeming topics. Because how do you know that I spent hours clicking around google, finding the most relevant, wacky site on a particular esoteric thing, of if I’ve just dribbled on the stumbleupon.

In this case, the latter — the stanford prison experiment, was one of about six psychology experiments done in the 20Cent. which supposedly went beyond what’s ethically good, but at the same time, these are the same ones that lecturers can’t stop yammering about. They get excited and froth up talking about them, then at the end of the rave they say, ‘but of course we could never repeat this today because of our strict moral and ethical standards and codes and committees’ … blah blah blah.
And you just know that in some underground base somewhere, they’re doing experiments that are ten times as hardcore.

Prisoner 8612 is a bad prisoner!

There was this French movie with either Jean Reno or Gerard Depp-ar-dew in it, I can’t remember which. It was probably the ‘inspiration’ for the Highlander movies. Because Jean or Gerard was a medeval knight who’d been transported the the present day, along with a retainer; that is, a little man with coconut shells who’d run along behind.
Every now and then my mind returns to this one scene where they’re in a bathroom, looking at a toilet, kneeling over it trying to figure out what it’s for. Jean/Gerard puts a hand in, scoops up some water and drinks it.
And I wonder to myself what were the details to that… was it cleaned extra, extra extra thoroughly before the scene? Perhaps they installed a completely new toilet that’d never been used before drunk from..? Even if it’d been cleaned 20 times with the most abrasive chemicals known to humanity I think there’d still be some residue of shit in there. Is that part of the hazards of being an actor, even a succussful hollyweird-style one?

I still haven’t found any interesting links. The internet just got boring or something. I’m not holding out on you, if I had some, I’d say.

I’m reading the Richard F. Burton annotated and translated version of Tales form the Arabian Nights, selected from ‘The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night’. I’ve been reading it for 4 years off and on — it’s huge and extremely convoluted. Nice book – hardback and the typeface is very fancy. My scanner’s busted at the moment or I’d offer up some.

This bit is from the editor’s forward, “Burton’s qualifications as a translator of the Nights were formidable, not only because of his extensive knowledge of Arabic (he was also fluent in Persian and Hindustani, not to mention several lesser Eastern languages and dialects) but because of his extrodinary personality. In 1853 he successfully made a pilgrimage disguised as as Afghanistan Muslim to Cairo, Suez, and Medina then on to the sacred city of Mecca, where he measured and sketched the mosque and holy Muslim shrine, the Ka’bah.
His account of the journey is not only a classic of English travel literature but also a brilliant commentary of Muslim life and manners. No enterprise could have born more powerful testimony to his knowledge of Eastern customs and beliefs than the expidition he later made to the forbidden East African city of Harer (1854-55) as he became the first European to enter this Muslim citadel without being executed.”

Sometimes it gets a bit bogged down reading, and you have to stick in active mode rather than passive reading because of the footnotes leading off in different directions – but most of the time they’re interesting.
Poignant to read place names like ‘Bassorah’ and Mosul as the backdrop to stories given the reasons why they’d be recognised today.
More info here.

Got a small job delivering the local free music newspaper around town. Me n’ this other guy nick in a little white van. He’s almost exactly like the quieter, snaggier of the two shop assistants in High Fidelity. Did everything except mention Belle & Sebastian.
Got to drive into the Ford (car) compound which was mildly interesting.

I don’t have much in the way of interesting links lately, apart from it’s funny how the seemingly innocent phrases, “mmm, that’s perfect” and “mmm, perfect” produce such a high rate of filth.

Re america what time is love? it’s a bit of a shame — I can’t say too much because the public here did the same thing. Maybe if the voting system there wasn’t so slabby and a little more proportional then the result might’ve (definitely would’ve) been different. And while both incumbents here and there presented a fear-boogieman, the one here – higher interest rates seemed more plausible than there; saying Kerry changes his mind. Since when was changing your mind such a weakness?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stop hitting yourself:
(a tanka, gross weight)
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself!

So I went to to that music street festival i mentioned so. Didn’t see AIH because it was too crowded to get in. Did see some jazz. I always end up stnading there longer than i can be bothered with for that kind of thing. It dies after half an hour. Caught up with one of my guardian angels, Flic, who i hadn’t seen in 6 years. She’s a head-doktor of sorts, which I’d always known, but hadn’t realised it was of the psychoanalitix subgenre. I was impressed to learn this because it’s the area that’s by far the funniest. Even people who are only a year or two older than me (like her) had seemed like grown ups whereas I had somehow been retarded at 18yo or younger. But I’m slowly starting to catch up or at least move on or something.

Me n’ GG wandered by the old house we used to be housemates in. It’s been officially vacant for a year or more now, but it looked like someone had been squatting there for a bit. It’s funny how squatters invariably end up creating the same kind of habitat that rats and other vermin do. Scrunched up newspaper and skanky matresses etc.
That foto is of the room that I used to live in, except the walls were painted smarties-green back then. Sometimes, in the warmer weather I’d lay on my bed and imagine the whole place was under water and I lived under water and that’s why it was green. Even if the room wasn’t, sometimes I lived under water.

It’s funny how one can hold out against mobile telephony for a good eight years then within a week of giving in, wind up sitting on the can holding the damn thing.
I don’t know if this happens to other people but i getquite a few rogue messages — fragmented calls not meant for me, and in one case a text messages advising that a particular movie was to be on television that night. I assumed this was from someone that I knew and had emailed to say, ‘hey, send me a message’, so i replied, saying that I’d just watched The Italian job with a Glaswegian tug-boat captain, which was true.

I hadn’t seen a house as messy as that in ages. Not dirty-messy, but stuff everywhere. Furniture wasn’t arranged along the walls as per normal — everything was a couple of feet in, as if the room was too big for him; an audio visual junky. A series of TVs lined in chronological order. When the old one broke down it was left where it sat. And not small things either, the oldest did look rather old but had a sizable screen.
The present day set up was a video projector suspended from the ceiling with one of those pull-down projector screens that was positioned right in the middle of the room so that you had to duck right down under it to get from one side of the room to the other.
He was eating stewed meat straight, no vegetables or nothing. It smelled terrible. Although he was good enough to put together some beans and rice for me. The movie was about what you’d expect considering it was made to sell cars.
******

There’s a version of Negativland’s song, U2 here, on the Illegal Art site. It’s a little shorter than the version I have on tape, but it’s got the ‘fuck you too, Richard’ line that gets me my jollies so well.

I was resetting up the stumbleupon function for Mozilla and in the sports category there’s the subcat, cheerleading. Leftbanker is always going on about the unspoken, ongoing tradgedy of cheerleader accidents, so I decided to find out what all the fuss was about. Check this out.
Sometimes I get a little resentful because it feels like australia has become the 51st state, but thank fuck cheerleading hasn’t caught on here. I think some of the rugby teams have a few but they don’t throw women 3 metres vertical and such.
I mean, in the past I’ve complained about tertiary education being a bit shoddy, but at least I didn’t have to wash cars all weekend to put myself through, while some chick doing accounting got a free ride-scholarship just because she was willing to risk being crushed at the bottom of a human pyramid.

What we’re reading:
I borrowed Obi Wan’s hardback copy of Alain deBotton’s Status Anxiety, have been frequenting the coolest coffeeshops and holding it up conspicuously in front of my head. Actually, it’s a shame I missed the two-part tv version because it hardly seems worthwhile writing a book about — reading through so far at least — the points are all so obvious, to me at least.
Although I can’t say I’m exempt from it all. Typically me, I’ve knee-jerked back against it all and am doing a paper round and hoeing other people’s gardens for free, or nearly free. Bigs said to me, “Hold on, I’ll go get you the little hoe” and I chuckle silently to myself. i was getting my kicks out of that bit all morning — Now where’d that dirty little hoe get to? .. and so on.

I saw Chris Wilson play at a joint the other night. In the bus on the way over I realised to the bottom of my gut that this was definitely one of those occasions where I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands. I was wearing jeans with those useless kind of pockets that nothing will go into, and since I’m not a drinker or even smoke a cigarette now, there was nothing else for them except flapping about … or was there?
I slipped open one of the top windows and stretched my right arm all the way out. A truck coming the other way took it off nice and cleanly. I went to the other side of the bus and did the same with my left arm, but had to wait patiently for ten minutes or so until passing through a narrow tunnel. Problem solved!

Little Green Bags – like this. If this was Invasion of the Little Green Bags! then the nasty twist at the end with Leonard Nimoy laughing would’ve well and truly happened by now.
From a marketing POV they’re a runaway success — I don’t think there’s been any advertising at all. There’s been anti-plakky bag guilt-trip ads but as for the LGBs – they’ve just showed up in large piles at the checkout and that’s all.
It’s things like this that give me a glimmer of optimism about positive change for the future. When people are given a reasonable alternative and they don’t have to think about it, they take to it like a duck to water. That is, all except for the old, senile and hopelessly disorganised —- who have LGBs in their car but forget to take them into the supermarket with them.

What I’m waiting for now is: Bandits to rob a bank with LGBs on their heads with eye holes cut out — or for it to at least happen on TV. TISM to perform wearing them.

I finally got started on a little tape-dropping work of my own the other week. I thought the best place to dip into it is with the tape-drop equivalent ofthe oil-painter’s bowl of fruit — ie. I ate a large bag of potato chips (crisps) noisily into a tape recorder. I thought it’d be relatively straight forward, but the first try I used a tape that was too old and fuzzed out, and I nearly cracked up laughing. The second was better, but i want a third try where most of the crunches are of 3 or 4 chips at once for maximum crunch sound, as opposed to the single-chip effort.
All this means I’ve been eating a lot of potato chips.

What I’d really like is a minidisc player so I could make lots of copies onto cassettes from the master. Also, I’ve been hearing so absolute rippers of conversations in op-shops n’ the like. The kamera’s on hand for anything oddball enough in the visual realm, but I’d love to digitise some of these audio-gems.

The Preston School of Industry is headed up by the guitarist from Pavement. I only listen to Pavement these days, but there’s a couple of PSoI tracks on that site. They’re playing at the Corner hotel in Richmond in a week n a half.

John Safran vs God – the first episode last night included 15-20 seconds of safran puking peyote tea.

The Post-punk Cooking show has a bunch of neato vegetarian recipes. If I wasn’t such a crazy rebel maybe I could actually understand them.

And here’s two pages on the jitterbug, how to do it and a bit of a background.