Oh boy, I accidentally ate some dip with mould in it last night. Lousy mild snap in the middle of winter. Frozen mushrooms or mouldy dip – that fridge is going to kill me.

Don’t ya love those situations where you eyeball some dude on the street and they match it, and end up being weirder, creepier, crazier than you, and you realise you’re not going to win, so have to look away and grin, thinking ‘boy, that guy’s nuts’.

I found out my little brother bought a sixteen hundred buck camera so I thought it only fair that I steal his sneakers. I haven’t actually seen the camera, but maybe at some point I can do a Chumps n’ Cheapskates review of it, because if you can’t afford a camera like that then you are probably taking too much drugs.
I haven’t seen the camera because he split for China (I say Shiner) on some agri-junket. Partly in Beijing (Bidge-ing) and partly in the wild-west northwest province, Xinjiang (children X-ing). I arksed him to bring me back a cowboy hat but I’m not getting my hopes up.

I really want to be friends with the middle aged guys at the post office. I go in there almost every day. After the whole bend over and be prodded in the passport procedure they know everything about me, including stuff I only just found out myself, like which ‘burb my dad was born in – Coburg – I thought it was mentone. My dad’s side of the family is the great unknown, and I’m awfully hesitant to venture in because of what I might find—that being almost certainly a long precession of mediocrity. One of those, If I haven’t heard otherwise it must be so, situations.
I don’t know much at all about the guys at the post office. Maybe I should apply for a job there. And then work there my whole life until I drop dead there—a man mediocre in every way apart from that he knew the ins and outs of the most detailed details of Post Office bureaucracy.

Went jigging. Pretty typical huh? I never shut up about things like going jigging. There was a guy there who looked exactly like Colm Meaney. Infact I think it was Colm Meaney with hair dye. Someone said they didn’t let their kids watch the simpsons because it gave them nightmares. I neglected to ask if the kids’ names were Rod and Todd.

Links for the link-hungry: – A large multimedia periodic table of the elements

– Moodle – an open source Learning Management System. Don’t know what a learning management system is? It cuts out that pesky middleman, university, and allows you to do your institutionalised learning from the comfort of your own home. Just like in The Matrix. Oh open source, is there anything you can’t do? – Resulting from ricocheted search—because I apparently didn’t know how to spell ‘enema’ – The enema lovers guide to the internet (you must be 18 to enter) – and Your First Enema. From it: “It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? You have this interest. You may be a girl in her 20’s, a man in his 60’s or anyone else at all in between—the thing that makes you different from “other people” is that you have an interest in enemas…”

-Then spiralling down to ALT.SEX.FETISH.ROBOTS FAQ. Nice.

I bought a new pushbike today. Iron Horse Adventure. First of all I’d like to thank those folk in China who oversaw the production of its components and whose weekly wage is the same as what I spent on chips last night at the fish n’ chip shop.
It’s a pretty sweet ride. All the gears work and it even has brakes, so it’s already ahead of my brother’s mountainbike that I’ve been riding for the last six months. I took it straight out to the ol’ cementy hill at Fyansford to see how fast it would go. Pretty fast, but I couldn’t lean too far over the handlebars because I had the kamera in my top pocket.

This is all that’s left of the chimneys out there. The photo doesn’t really do its massiveness justice. Looks like a good spot to shoot a scene for a cheap sci-fi movie.

I would’ve written something good on here in the last day or two except I’ve been pissfarting around with this CSS-changer plugin which would enable you, the reader, to choose from a couple of different ways the page can look. But I’ll be buggered if I can make it work. And frankly I have a hard enough time maintaining one theme, let alone several. I’ve been sick of this theme since about two weeks after the last reasonable opportunity I had to put some time into changing it, three months ago.

There was a guy from a bike shop lamenting the whole litagataseousness of society and saying that if the pushbike was invented today it’d never take off because it’d be labelled dangerous. He’s probably right too. And there’s thousands and thousands of people out there who won’t ride a bike because they don’t want to wear a helmet, which is a shame because those fat-arses could really use the excercise.
There was a leaflet taped to the handlebars of the one I bought. One of the sentences is, “If you don’t want to take any risks or are the type of person who blames everyone else for whatever goes wrong in your life, do not use our stuff!”
You’d have to admit they must’ve got a lot of whiney complaints of skun knees to get to that kind of opener, instead of the usual, ‘Congratulations on your purchase of the Iron Horse Adventure model…’
It’s crafty how they hitched a ride on the Ferrari dancing horse logo. It’d be pretty easy to slip up, get home from your purchasing adventure and go, “Hang on a minute! I thought I bought a sportscar! What’s this pushbike doing in the driveway?” – On that last post about Gmail, I was just thinking that really I’m just as much of a rube as the next person. I wasn’t really saying I wasn’t, but it’s rather clever the way they gradually made it available—first, while it was still Beta, to so called opinion leaders online like a.wholelottanothing.org—who are guaranteed to give it a postitive review. Then to Blogger users – who can invite a friend -> which automtaically creates talk and for a little while at least a small amount of exclusivity in an environment where there’s not much of it normally—anyone can downlaod software if it’s free etc.
If Google had just provided a page to sign up on there would’ve much less said about it.

I’ve been going a bit berzerky malerky with the images and that’s totally okay.
I saw this out at the recycle depot and was very tempted to buy it. I may still do. I think it’s $8.99 – although it looked like they’d come into a whole load of stickers that said $8.99, because they were stuck on everything and everything was $8.99. It’s the $8.99 sale.

I just had another exam this morning, in the big hall this time – a gymnasium hall thing but they roll down carpet and hide the basketball backboards real good. Pretty damn Orwellian sitting there at this little table, the tables in long rows, silently filling in circles while overseers silently float past. High, high roof. Everyone seperate and no one overtly goofing off. I was imagining what It’d be like if that’s what I and everyone else did 5 days a week, 9->5—obediently sitting filling in forms in a big room.
That was the last one, ever. I’m done. I hope I passed because there’s no way I could drag myself through anymore of it for some time. Am I going to take a little break?
No. It’s tempting, but a decade would slip by just like that, he says clicking his fingers. It’s like I’m doing life backwards, I’m the kid who doesn’t think ahead and eats desert first and had retirement first and now I will work until I drop dead on the linoleum.
The people at the institution and going to take a look at my resume tomorrow and I’m going to apply for the same job that keeps coming up, and I keep applying for but never get.

It’s not like I’m a complete slacker. Agreed, I’m indulging in a form of slacking right now, but have you ever tried to squeeze an orange house brick in your ear at this time of day? There’s no more room. I did read some of the text book during the year, but same as last semester i get to the night before and am sitting reading through vast tracts of stuff I didn’t really know was there .. and I’m thinking ‘hey this is pretty interesting! I wish I’d spent a bit more time on it’. And there’s this whole chapter on the biological basis of personality, probably one of the more dodgey areas.

On the exam tomorrow half of it is ‘pick a school of personality psychology and write about it in depth’. I was thinkiing, what if I’d swotted all the year so far for this one pay where I’d go in there, write a scintilatingly brilliant knife-sharp essay on biology-psychol. and then in the last sentence or two get a bit rabid and let slip ‘supermen’, ‘rise of the aryan nation’ ... the written equiv. of twitching eyelid muscles, the smallest amount of flying spittle.
I wonder how they’d mark it?

ps. I’m not a fascist.

If I could have one super power it wouldn’t flying or any of those things, it’d be the ability to always pick the right answer on multiple choice questions, because half of the fun would be finding ways to actually use it.

In this highly individualistic society, perhaps the most direct way to suceed is not to be swotting, but focussing on how I can vanquish my foes—ie. my classmates. There’s no room for teamwork in this business. They even tell us that in the lecture theatre – they call it collusion. You get chucked out for it.
So at this late stage, what I can do is run into the exam hall 20mins into it, and yell, “I’m not retarded! I’m just running a little late!”—which, by my predictions, should unsettle up to 25% of the competition.

Since their already chopping services and quality out of education like mad buggers, I should suggest to them that instead of running all the exams they should work on a threat-like basis, where there’s a 50% chance of not actually having to sit the exam. Students won’t be sure, so they’ll study and learn anyway, and the vice-chancellor won’t have to pay those old bats who hover around to make sure you’re not cheating off the nerd in front.

Yeah, I’m desperate alright.

How cool is Add n to (x) with song titles like, ‘Steve’s going to teach himself who’s boss’, and ‘Old lady Ealing does man experiments’ ..? I think they’re from Germany and inspired the whole local SpaceRock thing here a while back in Shaolin Woodmen, Dave Thrussel and Ollie Olson.

I had to take down the wiki because people were abusing it.

I’ll let you in on one of my eternal, universal truths: if you have an idea get it out there because sitting on it only guarantees that someone else will beat you to the punch. Even if your idea is stolen you can still take the moral high ground and tell yourself that you thought of it first, but if it’s not Out There First, then you just look llike a copy cat.
And so, still half-baked and at an highly (pronounced ‘eye-lee’) inopportune time in that I have freakin’ exams to study for, I’ll tell you about THE BOX.
It will have lights and whirring bits and make noises. There won’t be any way to see what goes on inside the box. I will invent it and what it does is I feed a bunch of information into it and it gives an answer. It will make me rich.
Specifically – it will predict which suburbs in a city/town will rise in property value based on the migration patterns of how funky hipster people move into a divey/industrial/backwater ‘burb which the yuppies/gentry then eventually catch on to and buy up at much more exorbitant prices in a feeble attempt to purchase souls for their wretched cappo shells of bodies.
The bigger a city, the more complex the equation—lots of variables. For instance, the historical development patterns of a city like Sydney are way more chaotic than Melbourne. Of course the workings will have to more-or-less break it down to a street by street basis, but for resell purposes (that is, the information to the land-owner class who may or may not be yuppified, they could just as well be slobs – as long as they have they money for a) the information b) the property bought off the hipster and resold to the yuppy at many hundred % markup) I’ll only give general ‘burb names.
In fact the box won’t really do anything except blow smoke up people’s arses. I’ll be making the decisions, but it’ll look good. Here’s one for free: the arrow here’s pointing at North Geelong.

Believe me, you probably wouldn’t want to read anything I post at the moment anyway because I’d keep slipping into essay-speak, “While, such as, contrast this with, however, however however, yet blablabla”. It’s ugly. I gotta get me some new words. I vowed to myself that until people start saying “moreover” in the milkbar then I will never write it. Now there’s not even any milkbars.

On the last assignment i got back—make that the only assignment I got back – how d’ya like that for a clevernation education system—one of the comments the marker left was, “Use academic language”, and I’m like, Pfft, how do you think that expression, “well, it’s academic now” = it DOESN”T MATTER .. came about??? Because the academy shut itself off from the normal man.

It’s probably only because if telly that normal people know what psychology is, and I reckon that on average, twice a week for the last two n’ a half years people have arxed me, “so what’s communication studies?” and y’know what? I STILL DON”T KNOW.

_

I see there’s some paintings by the Impressionists on tour at the moment. I don’t know a whole heap about art but I’ve always been able to identify with VanGough due to his craziness. I’ve got cut out pictures from calendars and magazines all over the joint here.

It struck me the other night while watching A Clockwork Orange that I tend toward anything that’s nicely exaggerated. Afterall, art in any form will always be some kind of facsimilie of life, so why bother trying to make it like reality when it clearly isn’t? So I thought clockwork was pretty good, – the way the main charcter just lay there with his mouth open waiting to be fed etc.

And Vincent’s bright colours. Nice.

Y’know it was when the Manchester sound went into decline, around ‘93 that Bristol expanded, and now ‘unemployed yoof’ has fallen to no.3 on Britain’s main exports. Behind no.1 what is loosely termed ‘Documentary’ – but often are done in collaboration with US-based media companies and contain just as much CGI as real footage. No.2 with a bullet is these things I’ve mentioned before – saucy recreations/dramatisations of various periods in the last 600 years.

They should do a sitcom based on the time when VanGough and Gauguin were housemates in the south of France.

Gauguin: Vincent, have you seen my new tube of ultramarine?

VanGough: I threw it in the fire!

{Laugh track}

Gauguin: You did what?!

VanGough: It kept talking at me and it wouldn’t shut up—

{laugh track}

VanGough: wouldn’t … shut… up [anguished]

{audience: awwww}

What I like is when someone stops me in the street and asks me for directions and I’m able to give them to them. That makes me feel good. Like I have a point. Also I like delivering things people like to get. Admittedly community newspapers isn’t top of the range here, but at least they’re free, and you’d be surprised what kind of crap people will accept if it’s free. But something quality would be really tops.
I want to get a plastic bowl, spray paint it gold and attach wings to the sides then wear it. Also wings for the heels of my shoes. I already practice the leaning bit. Rather than walk right up to someone I stop at about four feet away, stretch out an arm and counter-balance with a leg swung out in the other direction. I couldn’t find a picture of him doing that on the net, but there’s one in my bulfinch book. Wait until the scanner’s working.

You’d never know it but I updated to nucleus 3.0
Mostly this entry is just shunting so the page load isn’t so big.
My favourite song at the moment is Xcentric by Monolake – nice to get back to ‘pure’ electronic. All the voice bit sample grow tiresome, particular when I hear bits from the same sources. Xcentric sounds like there’s a whole bunch of ping-pong balls in it.
KLF played in Melbourne last night but the first I heard about it was Friday. Sigh.

Y’know the cognitive psychologists like to compare brains to computers and I don’t know that it’s such a fantastic idea but at the moment I got some serious malfunctions. Ninety per cent of my head is doing nothing – it’s not doing the homewerk and it’s not coming up with anything cleverclox for here either.
Actually, after two odd incidents today the thought entered that my head is leaking thoughts. Everyone, I’m sure, gets those moments where you’ll meet someone who will say something so highly appropriate that you get paranoid thinking that they are a mind reader. But what I’m talking about is way more – a serious, open-for-all hole. You know what I’m going to write next eh…

I’ve been farting an awful lot lately.

Here is a word-guide of for how to be speakin’ da Jamaican Mon. I heard that link on the radio.

I’ve completely lost the ability to do small talk. I’m continually presented with these situations where I could lean across the bus aisle and say, “sooo, Holden Racin’ Team fan are ya? Not doin’ too well this year are they?”—but I don’t and haven’t done for way too long and now I can’t. It’s getting to that time of year where you can say, “cold enough for ya?” too.

I only mention this because I’ve put the boot into them for every other attempt, but the bloodyvolvodriver ad campaign finally did an interesting one—everyone in it has beards including the women and kids and there’s doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. As they say in finland, niceypoo.

This image comes from a collection of fotos on salt and what it does to metal.

There’s a small set of darkly nice digital fotos of a ghost-town called Pittsfield which is part of this modern ruins site.

And both of those links come courtesy of artnotes.

I’m having a read through feral children.com. The ‘confined’ section’s a bit grisly, and I haven’t had a look at the ‘isolated”, but kids raised by animals is pretty damn interesting. They got a jackal girl, gazelle boy, sheep boy, Irish sheep boy, couple each bear girls and bear boys, dog boy { atlas, half-man, the geeks, the hired hands…} goat boy, monkey boys, leopard girl, more wolf boys than you could poke a stick at, and my personal fave: a monkey girl found in Ugnada by an Italian missionary.
As if adjusting to human society wouldn’t be confusing enough for the kid, the Italian decides to name her, “Baby Hospital”.
hehe, baby hospital—I gotta pinch that for a story.

I have the sneaking suspicion the whole website was set up to help sell a book. If it has, then they’ve gone to a lot of trouble.

Heard: In chemist, one middle-aged lady to another, “Can I touch you? Touch you for luck?”
Seen: Woman with kid in supermarket eating a little parcel of cold meat she’d presumably got at the deli. That’s great. More people should eat supermarket food while they’re still in the supermarket. That way you don’t have to pay for it.

While there’s more than a few christians who missed their calling as advertising creatives, I don’t think this sign belongs to one of them—I’d seen this for weeks before I finally got it. I wonder if god has a good knee-mail spam filtering application and if so could it please be open sourced because us mortals could sure use one.

Red hat is the name of a Linux distribution, they have a free version of their product named Fedora. This morning I found out that Fedora is the name of a hat. Here is a picture of one. And here is a glossary of hat terms.

Last night I was sitting on the lawn of a front yard overlooking Corio Bay. Talking to Michael Douglas but I don’t remember about what apart from him finishing a sentence in a casual tone of voice saying, ’... that was before I had the sex change operation’. Before I had any time react in whatever way I was going to a series of airforce planes and jets flew over. It was all part of some carnival in the town. A harrier jet slowed down and hovered right over the top of us. It brushed tree branches out of the way. S’pose I was a little surprised at how quiet it was and how little wind it produced. It was aqua. It’s engines faltered a bit and it jerked down to 20 or 30 feet above. I was a bit worried it was going to conk out and squash us.

A couple of weeks back I was vaguely wondering what I am going to do when I finish uni. There was a newspaper opened to the classifieds on the coffee table in front of me. A small ad caught my eye, “Be a Ninja” it said and directed me to khninjas.com. From it I read: “Their highly illegal counter culture was underground and it…” and thought, I’m counter culture, um, highly illegal and I go underground sometimes, like on holidays.
They have a local group and eventhough the pictures on the site are of people in black costumes, it says that Ninjas dress normally and could be any of the people you know walking among us. Yeah, so the Ninja life is mighty tempting—the way I figure it, if a Ninja wants to lay across the whole couch, he can because that what Ninjas do—if they want. Maybe me n’ the other Ninjas could take on Delphin and kick their proposed arses out of Fyansford, saving the villagers.

I’ve been feeling a bit like the proverbial teapot, short and stout, getting all steamed up and ready to shout except that someone stuck a gobber of bubblegum in whatever hole the steam comes out of. Nobody knows it’s time to tip me over, pour me out because they can’t hear anything. So I’ll probably explode and make a terrible mess.

- Been listening to internet radio. Finally, a decent app. for Linux, streamtuner, hooks into xmms. Listening to things I haven’t heard in a while, like drum n’ bass stuff and Zionradio, Jah Mon. And while I’ve known for a while that it’s a serious health hazard to listen to anything over 80 beats per minute while eating, especially dinner, I still end up doing it. Keep an eye on the obits. – I saw a platypus in the Barwon river. Amazing considering how toxic it was in summer—algal bloom, big red painted WARNING signs saying not to let the water touch you. Rivers are so temporary. – I feel like the whole of reality can at best only be considered a ‘secondary source’ of information lately. – This is that part of the year where the writing here is gruel-thin and you’re doing me a favour by visiting. – Got another story rejected and sent back the other day. They said only peasants use contractions. – Add ‘Winterbottom’ to the list of surnames that sound funny.

We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do! We wanna be free to ride! We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man! And we wanna get loaded! [crowd cheering]

That foto is from this bunch of collections of photos from Soviet Russia. They go from the ‘20s through to WWII.
And the top samples database helped remind me how that bit went.

[update: Mon arvo: I neglected to mention that I saw the Russian link at bighappyfunhouse, via excitement machine.]

[via brainal meltdown]

Sheepdog standing in the rain bullforg doing it again wsome kind of happiness is measured out in miles what makes you think your’re somehting special when you smile childlike no one understands jack kniefe in your swweaty hands some kinf od innocence is measured out in years you don;t know what it’s like to listen to your fears you can tralk to me you can talk to me you can tqalk to me if you;re lonely you can talk to mebig manwalkin gi nthe park wigwam firghtened of the dark somekinf od solitude ismeaures out in you you’re thin uyou kno me but you aven’t got a clue you can toalk to me you can tlak toiu me you can talk to meif you;re lonely you can talk to mehey bulldog heyy rarrhr ruff ruff hey ulldog ruff he bullog hey billeffog hey bulldog hey man what’s happening ruff, what do you say you say ruff you don’t need more roorrrhh ahh ahhhhaaaahhahaa you got it you got it tha’;ts right thata’s it taht’;s man that ’s it you got it ruff you really got potentital hahha hhhaaah ruff it you gotit ahhahhha ahhaa quiet quiet!hey bulldog

[I wish I could claim this but it’s from here along with a copy of Black Velvet Flag’s cover of Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalised.]

Boy it sure sounds like a lot more fun being a girl in a punk rockin band touring the US than being me. Here is a well written weblog that’s interesting too. The trouble is that the interesting material of being a full time student maxes out at getting squashed in the compactus, getting jazzed up on long, black coffee and sticking stuff in the electric stapler at the admin office window and hearing the example of ‘airline pilot’ used several times in a lecture and thinking, “maybe I could be an airline pilot”. Also, getting an inchworm on a textbook:

So what does a punk band listen to in the van while transiting between cities? Steely Dan.

There’s some good stories and photos of women in aviation at the 99s site. I’d never heard of this organisation before—although it is yankee, it’s also the kind of thing there’s probably a million discovery channel style docos on too. News to me though.

Those cwazy catholics are up to no good again, and this time it’s got to do with racing turtles and spinning rats. I heard about this on the radio so I don’t know if it hit the big internet sites. An article here.
Sidetracking from there, check out the fantastic merchandise here, including a book titled, Hitler: goose stepper and goose eater.

Q) You know what’s bringing me closer to wretching than anything else in recent history?
A) Discovering sqished bits of snail or slug on the carpet.

Q) You know what depresses me most of all?
(apart from missing out on tickets to see Kamahl perform in geelong on thursday)
A) Not the 40 hour famine, the greenhouse layer or dolphins. It’s the fact that even when I find a good pair of shoes that are really comfortable, eventually the heel of the sole will wear down and they’ll have to be chucked out. I know cobblers can supposedly fix that kind of thing, but it doesn’t look the same and it doesn’t feel the same.
I refuse to believe it’s got something to do with me walking llike a mutie; dragging one leg behind, torso tipped on an angle to the side, arms bent up against my chest with hands flopping about, teeth hanging over bottom lip, heavy breathing and groaning.

I’ve been thinking about this a long time and the only answer I have is to splice some kind of production cell with the sole rubber. The type that makes fingernails would do. There’d have to be some special shop to go to get these special shoes. Depending on how much your shoes get worn down they could excite or chill-out the cell production rate. If you didn’t wear them for a month you would have platform shoes. If you left them for a couple of years they would take over your closet.

Last night I went water sking on Venus with the host from ‘My Restaurant Rules’. What does Venus look like? A lot like the Murray River. I think it’s ironic that the hosts of these newer shoes, alleged “TV Personalities” have no personality whatsoever. They all look and sound the same. It could’ve been one of the guys from Australian Idol, I’m really not sure. Someone let go of the tow-rope while going around a corner and there was a scene of smashed trees 10 or 20 metres onto the embankment. Unfortunately he wasn’t hurt. If they wanted me to like those shows why didn’t they get people like Kamahl to run them.

I would like to sum up by saying that if Shakespeare were alive today he would be well over 400 years old.