(no subject)
Mar. 29th, 2024 07:56 pmIn front of 46575 people, in a weird away strip
CARLTON
21 11 (137)
def
NORTH MELBOURNE
12 9 (81)
WE ARE THE NAVY…WHITES
36 Years, If I’d Lived
Nov. 27th, 2022 12:44 pmAnd so here we are, Constant Reader, speculating, reminiscing, masturbating and probably something even worse about the hypothetical life I would’ve led had time turned a different corner and I’d been able to stay, wanted to say, or been forced to stay, in the comforting but a little undersized bosom of the ATO.
I’m not suggesting that the ATO’s bosom was in some way underperforming. In terms of succour, it protected and, as far as I’ve been able to discern from recent interactions, still protects its people well. But when one wants to be comforted by a bosom, it’s important that the bosom is voluminous enough to provide that comfort. When you’re a baby, that doesn’t take much, but the bigger you get, the more voluminous that bosom needs to be.
At the same time, the metaphor is harder to sustain.
I’m not the only one who feels that way. I went to a wake for the sadly and dearly departed Brian Byrnes. He lived on the same train line as I did back in the early days of the 21st century, and whenever I caught up with him on the train, he was hungover. Permanently red-faced and wearing sunglasses, and he had often been up at the Elsternwick Hotel till 1AM of the same morning I’d meet him going into work. There was a trouper. While I was falling asleep at 10PM, he was kicking on amongst his friends and cronies at the Wick. But he still made it into work, got the job done, and could usually be relied upon for company over a few snifters at lunchtime.
The cancer got him, of course. He had some kind of cancer, some kind of melanoma biarinat (whatever I mean by that) if I remember rightly, which he knew about but made so lightly of. The week before the lockdowns started, a few months before he died, he was drinking with us at Windy Hill, traditional home of the Essendon footy club, which I would not normally be seen dead in, but Essendon itself plays at some other ground these days. Anyway, Byrnesy knew about the cancer but wasn’t concerned about it. He just drank with us as he normally would, and when I needed to get a train back to Ballarat, he got a lift with me to the station, wherefrom he could catch a train to South Yarra, and then, via the convoluted bullshit the State government requires of someone whose train isn’t on an African line, transfer to the Sandringham line to get home.
We couldn’t go to a funeral because the quasi-Fascist messianic Premier of this once-great state had forbidden all public assembly on the grounds of COVID, so they had a private ceremony. It wasn’t enough.
A wake was proposed at the Wick, but lockdowns still prevented us going and, eventually, one was organized at a pub nearby the Moonee Ponds office where he (and I) had worked. The Laurel Hotel had undergone a renovation, and, for some reason, the renovation had been controlled by someone whose brain wasn’t clogged with vegan-based fæces and delusions about their ability so inflated you could use them to raise the Titanic.
Byrnesy knew far more people than I thought he knew. He was a popular bloke in the office, it seemed, but mostly among the people who had started in the ATO around the same time he and I did. I ran into all manner of people I hadn’t seen for years, although it was a little more difficult to recognise some of them since they had aged (as had I) and of course the ol’ eyeballs aren’t too good at picking up the subtleties of human physiognomy these days. Fortunately, ears and memory are still good, so when people introduced themselves, I could remember who they were.
That made it a fun night, which is what I think Byrnesy would’ve liked. There was much talk of the modern ATO and how it had changed, and gotten much worse, such that it now can’t retain staff. The mingling of naivete about technology and a general contempt for the staff has produced a government department that resembles the kind of police state they would’ve envied in Nineteen Eighty-Four. People that are still there seem dispirited. Granted, it was never that enjoyable to begin with, but people have resigned themselves to either resignation or total la=ack of recognition from the powers that were and still are. But people I’d worked with years ago were still there and having good memories of Byrnesy, which was the object of the exercise.
If I hadn’t left when I did, I’d be caught in a terrible job, constant phone calls and the stress that causes, with no chance of promotion because I didn’t have a degree and I don’t want to be a team leader, with parts of my day taken up with acknowledgement of the Abos and reading scripts I didn’t write, but could’ve written better, to people who ring the ATO for an explanation, not a reading of something they should be able to find on the website, but can’t because all the website say snow is to consult their tax agent. And, as I may have said before, the ATO‘s reputation is not great. Among government departments, the reputation for ATO employees not being good at their jobs really kills any chance you might have of transferring to a more sensible department, so I’d still be stuck there.
Vale Brian Byrnes—and I’m damn glad to be out of there.
I’m not suggesting that the ATO’s bosom was in some way underperforming. In terms of succour, it protected and, as far as I’ve been able to discern from recent interactions, still protects its people well. But when one wants to be comforted by a bosom, it’s important that the bosom is voluminous enough to provide that comfort. When you’re a baby, that doesn’t take much, but the bigger you get, the more voluminous that bosom needs to be.
At the same time, the metaphor is harder to sustain.
I’m not the only one who feels that way. I went to a wake for the sadly and dearly departed Brian Byrnes. He lived on the same train line as I did back in the early days of the 21st century, and whenever I caught up with him on the train, he was hungover. Permanently red-faced and wearing sunglasses, and he had often been up at the Elsternwick Hotel till 1AM of the same morning I’d meet him going into work. There was a trouper. While I was falling asleep at 10PM, he was kicking on amongst his friends and cronies at the Wick. But he still made it into work, got the job done, and could usually be relied upon for company over a few snifters at lunchtime.
The cancer got him, of course. He had some kind of cancer, some kind of melanoma biarinat (whatever I mean by that) if I remember rightly, which he knew about but made so lightly of. The week before the lockdowns started, a few months before he died, he was drinking with us at Windy Hill, traditional home of the Essendon footy club, which I would not normally be seen dead in, but Essendon itself plays at some other ground these days. Anyway, Byrnesy knew about the cancer but wasn’t concerned about it. He just drank with us as he normally would, and when I needed to get a train back to Ballarat, he got a lift with me to the station, wherefrom he could catch a train to South Yarra, and then, via the convoluted bullshit the State government requires of someone whose train isn’t on an African line, transfer to the Sandringham line to get home.
We couldn’t go to a funeral because the quasi-Fascist messianic Premier of this once-great state had forbidden all public assembly on the grounds of COVID, so they had a private ceremony. It wasn’t enough.
A wake was proposed at the Wick, but lockdowns still prevented us going and, eventually, one was organized at a pub nearby the Moonee Ponds office where he (and I) had worked. The Laurel Hotel had undergone a renovation, and, for some reason, the renovation had been controlled by someone whose brain wasn’t clogged with vegan-based fæces and delusions about their ability so inflated you could use them to raise the Titanic.
Byrnesy knew far more people than I thought he knew. He was a popular bloke in the office, it seemed, but mostly among the people who had started in the ATO around the same time he and I did. I ran into all manner of people I hadn’t seen for years, although it was a little more difficult to recognise some of them since they had aged (as had I) and of course the ol’ eyeballs aren’t too good at picking up the subtleties of human physiognomy these days. Fortunately, ears and memory are still good, so when people introduced themselves, I could remember who they were.
That made it a fun night, which is what I think Byrnesy would’ve liked. There was much talk of the modern ATO and how it had changed, and gotten much worse, such that it now can’t retain staff. The mingling of naivete about technology and a general contempt for the staff has produced a government department that resembles the kind of police state they would’ve envied in Nineteen Eighty-Four. People that are still there seem dispirited. Granted, it was never that enjoyable to begin with, but people have resigned themselves to either resignation or total la=ack of recognition from the powers that were and still are. But people I’d worked with years ago were still there and having good memories of Byrnesy, which was the object of the exercise.
If I hadn’t left when I did, I’d be caught in a terrible job, constant phone calls and the stress that causes, with no chance of promotion because I didn’t have a degree and I don’t want to be a team leader, with parts of my day taken up with acknowledgement of the Abos and reading scripts I didn’t write, but could’ve written better, to people who ring the ATO for an explanation, not a reading of something they should be able to find on the website, but can’t because all the website say snow is to consult their tax agent. And, as I may have said before, the ATO‘s reputation is not great. Among government departments, the reputation for ATO employees not being good at their jobs really kills any chance you might have of transferring to a more sensible department, so I’d still be stuck there.
Vale Brian Byrnes—and I’m damn glad to be out of there.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.8
(no subject)
Apr. 17th, 2022 10:22 pmIn front of 33433 people
CARLTON
14 10 (94)
def
PORT ADELAIDE
13 13 (91)
NO CRIPPS?
NO WORRIES
(no subject)
Apr. 3rd, 2022 06:26 pmIn front of 66317 people
CARLTON
11 8 (74)
def
HAWTHORN
11 7 (73)
THE BLUES ARE BACK, BABY!
(no subject)
Mar. 24th, 2022 10:25 pmIn front of 34961 people
CARLTON
16 6 (102)
def
WESTERN BULLDOGS
13 12 (90)
OH, WHAT A SEASON SO FAR!
(no subject)
Mar. 17th, 2022 09:17 amIn front of 72179 people
CARLTON
14 17 (101)
def
RICHMOND
11 10 (76)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!
The Degree That Never Ends
Feb. 6th, 2022 01:06 amSo, I was happily—if you can judge by the frequency of 'LOL'—typing away on the ol' Larry Niven chat this morning when the phone rings. I hate it, with a passion born of experience and borne by continued experiences, when the phone rings. The damn thing never rings when I'm just slobbing around the house without even the energy to raise the intent of just clicking on a button and playing Freecell. It only ever rings when I'm doing something else, something that is 99% more likely to be more interesting than talking to whoever's on the other end calling me.
"FUCK!" I yelled at it. "GODDAMN FUCKING NIGGER ARSEWIPE CUNTS RINGING ME UP! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?! USELESS FUCKING KAFFIR BASTARDS! Oh, it's a real number." And it was. Bullshit numbers are easy to spot. If someone from Thailand is calling me, chances are it's a bullshit call. If someone from England is calling me, it can only be one of three people and I know their numbers. If the USA is calling but I don't recognise the number, it's bullshit. Numbers ostensibly from Melbourne but where they start with 613 8 blah blah blah are fairly likely to be bullshit. Text messages talking about my packages being held up by Customs are bullshit. But this one was from Gippsland.
It was a nice lady called Debbie from ederation University, who was calling to answer some questions I had had about my degree. I had been told that it was a requirement to have at least two third-year (ie, 3000-3999 course codes) courses before I could graduate. So I was just checking on that. I had also made an enquiry about what I should do for my minor now that Federation University was getting rid of International Studies.
But of course what I actually said was: "They've got you working on a Sunday?"
"Yeah. We're just trying to get through an enormous backlog of enquiries."
"I'm not surprised you have them with all these changes. I'm certainly not the only one who's concerned about graduating."
"That's what we're trying to answer. Anyway, to answer your first question, yes there is a requirement to have two 3000-code courses to complete your major. You have three, so there's no worries there."
"And I only need eight courses to graduate, right?"
"No, you need twenty-five."
Twenty-five?
"twenty-five?" I said.
"Yes. You need eight units for your major, four for your minor, and thirteen electives, with a maximum of ten first-year, 1000-code, courses."
"Good God&…"
"So, if you complete two courses this semester, and keep that up for each semester, you'll graduate at the end of 2023."
"What?"
"You need one more course for your minor, and five electives, so you would have one more course to do in semester two of 2023, so —"
"Yeah, I get it. I was just a bit surprised. You can take ten years to complete your degree —"
"Yes."
"— but if you did one course per semester you'd only have twenty units by the end of your ten years. Seems a bit unfair. Ah, well, I tried doing three courses once and nearly exploded, so I'll stay with it. 2023, eh? Thanks for the update."
"No problem. Is there anything else?"
"No,no, that's everything. I can do the re-enrolments myself if I need to drop a course this semester, then pick up the actual course to complete my minor if they're offering it in Semester 2."
"I'll send you a revised copy of your student plan so you can better know which courses you need to do to guarantee completion of your minor."
"Thank you. Have a good Sunday."
"'Bye."
So, I stood there reeling for a bit. fucking hell. I thought I was close to graduating but I'm nowhere near there. Okay, the rational outlook is that I'm closer to graduating than I was in 2017 when I started this whole thing, but just then it looked like there was narrow tunnel slowly squeezing shut to smother me before I got anywhere with this stupid, endless degree.
Okay, so I'm really only doing it for fun. Nothing's really riding on it. I don't need it for a job or anything. But it would be nice to get it, and I was looking forward to graduating while I was still 60, and not 61. Threescore years and one? What is that?
The plus is I can pick electives from anywhere at Fed Uni, provided I have the prerequisites. I see a future of some bullshit marketing course, maybe another IT course, maybe some nursing. They might let me take my Duolingo scores and limp through to a pass in Irish or something. I don't know. I briefly felt like chucking the whole thing and writing it off to experince, but I've come too far now. Maybe I should enrol in five subjects next semester? Ha! I hear they don't have asylums anymore, but they would have to medicate me seriously if I did that.
So there it is. 2023. I suppose it's not too far away if you compare it to, say, 1962. So I'll do that.
Shimmyin' in the Shower
Jan. 26th, 2022 02:57 pmIt's very rare that I even pay attention to the advertisements that clog my free to air TV feed as I sit impatiently waiting for something watchable to emerge from some sort of human intelligence, which hardly ever happens—I mean, look at the latest series of "Death in Paradise"—but you can live in hope. One day, however, I actually was paying attention to one of these ads, and it was for a thing called a 'Shimmy Scrub'. The idea is that this plastic thing has massaging knobs and soft bristles on it and you can scrub your back by shimmying—a kind of dance—to clean it.
"Holy crap," I said. "That's a fucking good idea." Nobody heard me, of course, which is why I'm telling you now.
These things were supplied by a company called Global Shop Direct. They are constantly on TV, between ads for insurance, funeral insurance, incontinence pads, incontinence insurance, funeral pads and, at night, local merchants (where 'local' can often mean South Australia, south east New South wales, Warrnambool, and occasionally somewhere nearby). They're one of these places that sell frying pans, massage chairs, pillowcases, nuclear weapons, and incontinence pads, all of which are payable on instalment plans. I just assume that whatever they sell is going to be junk, so their blandishments go straight through to the keeper.
But this blandishment particularly appealed to me because it seemed to offer a solution to a vexing problem. How do you scrub your own back? In my younger days, I was dexterous enough to shake hands, as it were, behind my back, but even I have to admit that I can't do that anymore and in any case I can't apply a great deal of pressure to any scrubbing I might do. Couple that with the gradual buildup of skin cells and fatty deposits on my back and you end up with a white, hairy clump of dermatological Armageddon back there. So, on seeing this solution, I kept the ad in mind…for a few weeks. Eventually, I got around to going to the website to order the damn thing.
This was less hideously painful than I had thought. I expected something as frantic as Pizza Hut or the Victorian Government in demanding my contact details, but no. They wanted a postal address for delivery, and they let me pay by PayPal, which kept my credit card details secret, and they only wanted my email address to send me a receipt—well, so far that's all they've sent, anyway.
Imagine my surprise and delight when, yesterday, just after some idiot phone call from some idiot or other, the postie turns up with a package! On opening the plastic bag I discovered:
I scrabbled open the package and leapt into the shower, eager to try it out. The first aspect of it is that the rubber, or plastic, or ersatz rubber or whatever it's made of is that kind of sticky, rubbery plastic that reminds me of Slime. But it did have massage knobs and soft bristles. So I hopped in and soaped it up.
By Crikey, it did a good job. The sensation of these bristles rubbing across the ol' dorsal section was actually quite pleasant. Indeed, if I were thirty years younger it would've produced quite the reaction… Anyway, it also did a great job of cleaning up the hair back there, and presumably giving a wash and brush-up to those little clumps of skin cells and oils that go by the name 'backne' and always make me think of incipient bedsores.
Here's a picture of the item and the things it replaces:
I might keep the green thing to do the ol' feet, but I am certainly replacing this bloody brush:
Will it replace someone else giving your back a scrub? It won't replace my darling Kelvatari or Faye Grant brought forward from 1984, but for the time being it will damn near do.
I have come into some government office to see a woman about a podcast that I think I'm going to be appearing on. The woman concerned is simultaneously of Indian descent and appearance, and she's sitting at a huge desk which is completely bare, with three chairs in front of it. She has the windows behind her, and I can't see her face clearly.
"I'm here for the podcast," I say.
"No."
"Can I sit in on the podcast?"
"No."
"I'll just leave my script and paper here, then," I say, putting said items into a desk return that is next to her desk.
I walk off, and when I look behind me, she's talking to another Indian woman and they're getting ready to start their podcast.
As I look around, I see that there are a dozen or so chairs in a circle, and I sit down in one of them. Then all these people come around and one guy announces that this is a 'collaborative editing meeting' and that everyone is welcome. They all sit down on the chairs and look at me expectantly. I say that I'm just here for the podcast, pointing to the two Indian women talking away (in English). Nobody in the circle has a clue who she is or what she's doing. Then they all get off their chairs and come over to me, and start to stroke my hair and pat me etc as if I was a panda they were getting to know.
There's too much money in the State Public Service. We Federal employees have always said that. Not only was I done out of my podcast appearance, but all these artsy types were treating me like some kind of furry omnivore—which is, to some extent, true—and doing it in work hours. Were they going to get any actual editing done during this collaborative session? Probably. These sort of committee things do get things done from time to time. Still, it isn't how I think of editing.
And what about the script and newspaper? It's been ages since I read a newspaper—and nearly as long since I wrote a script. Perhaps the script, podcast scenario and Indian women can be blamed on this week's episode of The Drunken Odyssey but is that really fair to the gang over there? The collaborative editing might come from my desire to produce a collaborative novel like Atlanta Nights with Laura, Turnip and Laura's friends. So we're reading through Atlanta Nights collaboratively to get a feel for it. At least, that's my plan. They may not want to waste time trying for a crap collaborative novel.
On to more interesting things in the next post.
Mac Attack
Jan. 16th, 2022 05:00 pmIn 1990, I was helping out with the production of the second Visible Ink annual effort out of RMIT. When I say 'helping', I mean that I was slowly typing out a manuscript into some God-forsaken publishing software on an Apple Macintosh. Said Macintosh had a ten inch black and white screen, pretty good graphics for 1990, microscopic icons that made less sense than an emoji-filled text message and the keyboard from Hell. I swore then by all that was then holy—the World Trade Centre in New York, the colony of Hong Kong, and apartheid—that I would never use a Macintosh again.
Flash forward thirty-two years-odd to yesterday. I had, in November last year, made the case that a Macbook would be a form of visual aid to help me live a more or less normal life, and that therefore the NDIS could pay for it. They had allocated $10220 for me to spend on visual aid equipment, and I had spent around $640 on computer repairs between November 2019 and November 2021. I hadn't spent any more because I kept getting knocked back on computer expenses, and they wouldn't go for a large screen TV, either. So, I finally convinced them of the utility of a Macbook and got a quote from JB Hi Fi on November 13th.
Then, by the time I'd forwarded the quote on to McCallum Financial Services so they could pay JB, my plan had expired and the new plan only had $5000 to spend. (Explaining these plans and why we need them I may do some other time.)
On January 7th this year, McCallum ring to say they'd paid the quote but the money would take a few days to reach JB. I gave it four days, and trotted down to JB on the 11th. After a bit of finagling with quote numbers and some ID on my part, they gave me this box:
There's no doubt about it. The unboxing process on Apple products is something of a delight, and I was sitting here with such expensive (or dollar-intensive) machinery that I felt like putting on a suit and tie.
After the delight of taking the thing out of its paper wrapping, I was even delighted to find that it even smelled nice. This was in stark contrast to the smell of my actual desk which had become a bit putrid over the previous week what with spilled tea and biscuit crumbs. In honour of this new machine, I cleaned off the desk using Windex and a Chux superwipe. Meanwhile, back at the box, I unpacked the charger and charging cable.
As you can see, the charger is about the size of an actual Dodge (or Valiant) Charger, so I had to unplug the Lenovo and the CZUR camera to plug this thing in. It was, as you would probably suspect if you've been following my journal for a few years, the work of a moment to plug the thing in. When I opened the lid it gave me a nice 'tada' sort of sound, the original 'tada' from the earliest days of the Mac if memory serves. Then the screen came on:
You can see the bottom of the monitor from an actual computer there. I was Googling like a mad thing to find answers to setting up a Mac.
After that there came a few hours of absolute Hell while I set the thing up. I won't go into that too much because the pain is still present and the wounds raw and bleeding, but fuck this thing was a pain where you simply don't expect pain to be, even at my age. ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snaky_poet once said that the good thing about Macs is that 'things just work'. I can now appreciate what an utter torture chamber the rest of her life must be. If she thinks things 'just work' on a Mac, she must turn on the lights by cramming coal into the loungeroom generator and strangling a kitten to propitiate the impedance gods. Nothing 'just worked'. The keyboard was easier to use then the one on the 14" Macbook that I had tried at JB, but not much easier. And I had to keep squinting at the dark screen to find the mouse cursor. It was tedious to follow the pointer across the screen until it was on the correct clickable bit, which I had to do because I was using the goddamned trackpad which, incidenntally, only works if you use one finger, but I kind of managed it. By 11:15 on Saturday night I was exhausted and resolved that everything I hated about Macs hadn't changed and that I w3as going to kick some obedience into the bloody thing on Sunday morning.
As gorgeous as the Macbook's packaging was, I had eschewed the very expensive Apple mouse in favour of a Logitech Pebble.
On Sunday I arose from the procrustean bed, if I may so call it, full of vim and vigour and, after tackling that morning's Wordle, cracked the old knuckles and…had a shower and got dressed, then had a cup of tea and, fortified by the morning's routine and the sustaining powers of tea, settled down to have another go at this stupid machine.
I got my darling Kelvatari on the ol' Skype because she had one of the damn things and could probably help. She got me through most of the process. At least to the point where I could fire up Safari, a browser I had previously only used on my phone, to try and install Microsoft Office on the Macbook. This process, very easy on a computer, is yet another arse-reaming on this thing. After five attempts to download the installer, each download taking approximately forty-five minutes before mysteriously halting, I finally got a complete file. I was able to install it just in time to head over to Write Club.
I still haven't been able to get the mouse to work. It's a Bluetooth mouse, so it should work without having to plug in the wireless receiver, which is impossible anyway because there're no plugs on the thing that the USB dongle from the mouse will fit into. I've got the thing connected to the network via WiFi, which is good because there's no Ethernet plug on it, either, and so far the only thing it's found is my Kindle Fire. It kept searching for the mouse for four hours before I was finally able to make it stop. But by 2:00PM on Sunday it was time to go over to Write Club. With a Macbook.
Now—even though I haven't written anything on it—I can say I'm a real writer.
We're on a W-class tram, the old wooden ones with the nice seats that were comfortable in the heat and whose brakes didn't seize up - but let's not get into that. You could still get on these things and do a tour of the Melbourne CBD on them before COVID struck. Anyway, there's me and Mum and incredibleloon (whom we'll call 'SuperJase' for the time being) and a white German Shepherd that is gallivanting around on the empty seats.
"Don't touch that dog," says SuperJase. "It's very important."
So I just let the dog go about it's business until ti says; "The weather's getting worse."
Mum then collapses. I leap to her aid, and get her head up so I can hear what she's saying.
But it's only a whisper that I can't hear, and she dies in my arms.
SuperJase looks on in shock. The white dog is gone. The tram keeps rolling along.
Well, after that, I rang Mum to see if she was alright, which she is. I took it on faith that SuperJase is alright, he being younger and fitter than me, and the last time I saw a white German Shepherd in real life was in a past life, I assume. Therefore, I don't know whether it could talk or was a portent of anything, let alone death.
I can tell you that that dream was had under the influence of four pints of cider and a Murphys burger from Irish Murphy's, after watching the new Ghostbusters movie.
Said movie experience was had at the Regent Cinemas in Lydiard St Nth. The cinemas themselves were nice and convenient, and the staff very helpful to a blind guy who couldn't find his way around at all. They took me to the box office, I paid $15 for my ticket, then they took me up to the cinema and came to get me at the end of the picture. The start time for the movie was 2:50PM, so the 'feature presentation' proudly announced—through a very mediocre sound system by cinema standards—started at 3:07PM. I won't spoil any part of it if I say that it's a good tribute to Harold Ramis and has revived my interest in the first movie, but it's also good evidence that it's possible to parlay a fanfic piece into a real script. What evidence do I have that it started as a fanfic? None. It just felt that way. The important thing is that it isn't 'written by numbers' and the writing is far better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—but then, what isn't?
It was probably visually interesting, but the sound in the cinema wasn't great, and the screen is so dark compared to a TV that I could barely see what was going on. It also had the reverse of the bit that totally confused me in Jurassic Park 2. In that movie, white Jeff Goldblum had a black child; in this one, the black sheriff has a white daughter¹. Are we supposed to ignore this? But at least all the female characters were played by cisgendered woman, and the males by cisgendered men, so no annoying chunks of political correctness to distract you from the actual narrative.
Prior to going to the movies, I took the vacuum cleaner in to The Good Guys in Mair St to get it serviced under the warranty. Under the fucking warranty. The shop lady was very nice about, took it away to check whether it needed repairs and turned it on. You could hear it across the shop. She brings it back and says:
"OUr store manager and I agree that all it needs is a new filter and new bags."
"You think it's normal that the thing is so loud I could hear it over this half acre of floor space?"
"See, the filter needs replacing and the bag needs to be changed."
$88 later I haven't had the thing serviced and I've got a ne filter and bags. Why fucking argue with me? It's not your money that will be spent fixing the fucking thing!
You may ask why I put up with this shit. Because we're not armed is why. Why do they even go on with this shit? Because they can, because we cant' shoot them. And don't get me started on Qants…
This is hardly a new rant for me. But now, With fewer people on staff because of the COVID, more and more defenceless consumers have to put up with this crap. Avoidance may be the best strategy. Don't buy a Miele vaccumn cleaner, and don't buy from The Good Guys.
1. Or so it sounded to me. The picture of the actress on the IMNDB shows that she is black. Her non-blasck accent may be explained by her being born in Kenya.
Laura, Peach, Dave and I are floating around some medieval landscape in a hot air balloon. A man on a chestnut mare is on the ground watching us as we come in to land. He then rides up to us and tells us that 'King is in trouble'. There is then a series of disjointed images which might form a story one day.
What the hell does this mean? The four balloonists are people I know, though I don't know Peach or Dave well enough to know their web presence. For the moment, let us consider them to be persons of mystery in, respectively, New York and New Jersey. Laura is the pretty and famous Laurasauras, of whom I have spokne of elsewhere, and to on Discord and in the throes of face to face conversation in these infected and paranoid times.
Is there, for example, any significance to the man on the horse, the colour of the horse, where it falls on the equine gender spectrum, and most importantly the lack of an article in the man's report that 'King is in trouble'? Which King does he mean? A king in a medieval dreamscape seems reasonablr enough, des rigueur one might call it if one were more confident of their French, but why treat 'king' as a proper noun? John King? Some movie?
In dream 2, my darling Kelvatari and I are at the Capitol in Washington DC. We're both following Senator Seager there. He is a Democrat from some state or other. Everyone is being scanned by wands for COVID. People are wearing various types of mask. I have forgotten mine, so Kelva runs back for it, and for my cane. Senator Seager says that no blind or vision handicapped person be scanned, so they refrain from scanning me. Seager walks into the main room of the building, while I wait for Kelva. Eventually, I walk out of the building and as I'm walked along I feel someone brush against me. I move away to give them space and they press against me. I keep moving until I hit the wall of the Capitol. I turn to see who this shoving arsehole is, and it's Kelva, with my mask and cane. She is very snarky.
Capitol? A Democrat senator? I prefer the Democrats tothe Republicans when I think about american politics at all, because Lincoln was a Republican, but what significance is al the mask and scanning etc. Perhaps it's a subconscious anxiety about travelling to, and getting into, the US in March, becauase, after 39 fucking minutes of clicking away on the goddamn Sodomite qantas website I was able to use my flight credit from 2020 that ScoMo so gladly first created and then fucked up the arse for me Alan Joyce style.
It is important to note that these dreams were had after seven cans of Jamesons, Lime and Dry during a six-hour marathon conversation which was to try and mediate a dispute occurring on the Larry Niven chat.
35 Years, If I'd Lived
Nov. 27th, 2021 05:21 pmSo, today, as it should appear to be whenever you’re actually reading this, marks what would have been the culmination of three and a half decades of service to the Commissioner and, more by tradition than fact, the Commonwealth. In real life, however, it’s December 31st and it has taken me more than a month to sit down and write even this small paragraph.
Why?
It certainly isn’t the relentless grind of making fifteen excuses an hour for why people don’t have their money yet or explaining ad nauseam that just because we sent the money doesn’t mean your bank has to let you have it. Goodness knows, it isn’t that. Anyway, those two things are part of the ol’ durance vile.
The elephant in the room, which nobody can shut up about, is the COVID. We have now been at this prevention idea, with its ramifications for personal freedoms, or at least what were perceived to be personal freedoms, the gradual arrival of a combination nanny/police state as we have to identify ourselves everywhere we go, advise the government of when we do it, and can’t even flee the country even if we’re not citizens. That was all 2020’s thing. This year, now that vaccines are ‘available’, we’ve been handing executive powers to unelected officials, letting the State government call things pandemics without having to show any evidence for doing so, and realising just how dependent we are on tourism in Victoria. Hospitality is a fine way of generating GST for the Federal government, but if nobody’s working in it because everyone is under house arrest for fear of passing the disease on to an already highly-vaccinated population, there’re no wages or GST for the Feds to tax, and no payroll taxes for the State. When I was actually part of an inquisitorial system that could and did pry into people’s lives daily, I used to dread the approaching Orwellian state, but thought I wouldn’t live to see it. Now I’m not so sure, and my life expectancy is not what it once was, due to a bloodstream that’s 7% fairy floss and 3% alcohol most of the time.
It’s the rapid onset of the thing that’s scary. No anonymous purchases, house arrest on suspicion of having the virus, the use of the information gathered by the State government in administering Federal law (not to mention what commercial concerns might get it—remember how quickly the ‘No Call’ register details were sold to American Express?—and now the new ‘emergency‘ powers which allow the Premier to declare an emergency before it’s even arisen. The important thing is that people now know that what they thought were their freedoms actually aren’t, and in a plague, you can kiss any of your rights goodbye, provided you let the government know where you were when you did it.
People have often said that if we had a Bill of Rights, just like the Americans have, in our Constitution we could solve these problems, just like the Americans have. But that’s a Constitution their Supreme Court says can be waived at any time, such that your right to bear arms doesn’t include the right to carry them. Although, that appears to be changing.
But of course, a Fascist state wants to see human rights codified so that they can produce exceptions to them. When I was at the ol’ workplace I used to say that ‘it all goes out the window when there’s money involved’. That’s also true where there’s a virus involved.
Which is what the ‘rise of neo-Nazis’ is all about. The swastikas on the Shrine of Remembrance aren’t about the rise of neo-Nazis. Neither is this thing Richmond got all upset about. The conditions that allowed and promoted the rise of Nazism just aren’t around anymore. Fascism had such control in Italy in the 1940’s the Nazis had to invade the place to get a foothold. But here the State government, and the Federal for that matter, can create a similar Fascist state that would crush the neo-Nazis once it took them even slightly seriously. The Victorian Constitution guarantees our right of free association, but if there’s a virus on? Forget it. What the swastikas are about is warning us that we are perilously close to a Nazi state from the government we’ve elected. Don’t rely on the Federal government for help, either. Not once they realise the value of the jackboot economy.
But there are more interesting things going on than a medieval terror of a virus that is so far less effective at killing people than heart disease and breast cancer. On June 6th I got an email from the good people at Mystery Weekly saying that they loved my story, ‘The Purloined Pachyderm’ and would like to publish it in their anthology Die Laughing. They paid me $AUD58.47 for it. My first ever sale! (The money came via PayPal, so as soon as I got it, I found that I couldn’t sequester it away, and thus immediately blew it on pizzas, but I did declare it as income and then deducted the cost of the software I used to write it.)
The story itself came from an analysis of “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe. After analysing that for a week or more as part of my never-ending course at Fed Uni, I vented my spleen and wrote a humorous (well, they bought it, right?) story with every Romantic reference I could cram into it. The actual anthology is not yet available on the Kindle, and I didn’t get a contributor’s copy, but I will patiently await its Kindlisation and get it then so I can read the competition. I can now say I’m a writer and at least have something to back that up. The next stop is a novel, which my darling Kelvatari and I are currently working on, and for which she has an in with a legitimate publisher. In the meantime, subscribe to Mystery Weekly and tell ‘em I sent you, so they will buy my next story.
Ballarat continues to be increasingly expensive, but it has had a pernicious but good effect on my social life. I went down to Melbourne for the Beakmeister’s birthday, and I realised then that most of my social circle consists of people from Ballarat Writers, that excellent Victorian incorporated association that seeks to and succeeds in promoting the interests of writers in the Central Highlands. Ah, well, for less social occasions with friends I have Facebook, but the main point of contact now is Discord, on which I can be found most days bitching about something or expressing the ennui that happens when people get near to being within a decade of the ol’ Biblical threescore years and ten.
Indeed, for those of you who’ve been following along, the threescore years is coming up. I hope to hell that I can get to Orlando in time to celebrate it with the aforementioned Kelva, and her birthday, too, but that all relies on the viral panic that COVID has not so much caused as justified.
And what for 2022? Well, it’s the 100th anniversary of 1922, so that’s something. We have a Federal election somewhere between March and May, the possibility of yet another form of ID being brought out to keep those safe for the Gesundheitspolizei (Health Police) and the general public, and then a Victorian one in November if it can’t be shut down because of the Pi variant, or what4ver the fuck we’ll be up to by then.
(no subject)
Jul. 30th, 2021 10:27 pmIn front of an undisclosed number of people
CARLTON
18 4 (112)
def
ST KILDA
12 9 (81)
WE CAN STILL MAKE THE FINALS!
(no subject)
Jul. 24th, 2021 04:25 pmIn front of 0 people thanks to viral panic, against the bottom side,
NORTH MELBOURNE
18 8 (116)
def
CARLTON
11 11 (77)
WE COULD'VE MNADE THE FINALS
(no subject)
Jul. 18th, 2021 06:51 pmIn front of 0 people thanks to viral panic,
CARLTON
13 13 (91)
def
COLLINGWOOD
9 8 (62)
WE CAN STILL MAKE THE FINALS!
(no subject)
Jul. 3rd, 2021 10:39 pmIn front of 12000 people and 103 Freo fans
CARLTON
12 8 (80)
def
FREMANTLE
8 16 (64)
TWO IN A ROW, BLUES!
(no subject)
Jun. 27th, 2021 07:42 pmIn front of some people
CARLTON
12 11 (83)
def
HAWTHORN
10 13 (73)
BETTS IS THE BEST—AND HE'S BACK
(no subject)
May. 22nd, 2021 04:13 pmIn front of some people
CARLTON
13 8 (86)
def
HAWTHORN
9 9 (63)
THE FIRST TIME IN 16 YEARS
(no subject)
May. 2nd, 2021 06:27 pmIn front of 57 447 live people
CARLTON
19 9 (123)
def
ESSENDON
16 11 (107)
HOW SWEET IT IS
