Sunday arvo walk in the neighbourhood

Bike polo anyone?


Let's finish with an historical quiz. Put names to the faces.

Mogblogging like it's 2005...

LOL-Tobias has come out of semi-retirement....

Fact

People who sit on hour-long teleconferences, breathing loudly into the receiver the whole time, so that everyone can hear their serial-killeresque heavy breathing = FOUL!!!

Pointless rant #372 - freak weather pattern edition

I saw people on the weekend wearing scarves.

Honest to goodness, scarves.

The minute the temperature drops below 20 degrees, Sydney people freak and bust out the polar fleece and heavy coats. Despite the fact it's still 95% humidity.

Maybe they're adopting the jockey weight-loss regimen and they're trying to sweat themselves down to their racing weight.

Buncha clowns, I tells ya.

Pretty much sums up my reaction to seeing Matthew Newton in the nude on Underbelly last night

The hard questions. Asked here.

Is it wrong of me to ignore an email from a colleague, just because she spelled my first name incorrectly?

And I don't just mean a typo. I mean wrong by about 50% of the total letters in my first name (which, before you ask, is definitely not hard to spell).

The error comes despite having worked together for 12 months, and despite the fact she would have had to have entered my name in when entering my email address.

Well anyway, that urgent email is going to sit there for a while. At least for as long as it takes me to finish this post...

Which, in a seamless segue, is something I was originally going to put on twitter. But I realised that I have been foregoing blogging in favour of the odd random tweet.

In particular I'm quite happy with the developing thread of tweets on the new, 18 year-old admin assistant here at work that manages to insert a reference to McDonalds into just about every conversation.

For example, when I complained of a stomach ache, I was usefully informed that cheeseburgers are a surefire cure for stomach ache. When we experienced a blackout, I was urged to race down to McDonalds as they would most certainly be throwing out a whole load of burgers.

Both of these were absolutely ripping suggestions for a vegetarian such as myself (mmmm, unrefrigerated processed meats - delightful!)

Totally worth signing up to twitter and following me just for that.

A guy walks into a cafe...

"We'll have two herbal teas, bacon and eggs with toast, and scrambled eggs with a side of smoked salmon and mushrooms.

Oh, and we have to be at an appointment in 10 minutes, so
you'd better get onto that straight away."

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go around expecting that the world will bend to your will and expectations, no matter how unreasonable.

It's like those people on the roads who decide that they want to turn left, even if they are in the right-hand lane of a 3-lane highway. Instead of conceding that they've missed the turn and finding somewhere safe to turn around, they just stop dead in the right-hand lane with their left-hand indicator on, waiting for a gap in the traffic, with not a care in the world for the line of 50 cars banked up behind them.

Or the women who force those double-wide prams down narrow, inner-city streets (taking out many a passer-by's ankles on the way) and then act surprised when they don't fit into the teeny-tiny cafes, already crammed full of people and chairs.

It's a scaled-down version of the blokes who driver Hummers around the laneways of Newtown - Newsflash! The built environment will not magically morph itself to adapt to your choices!

.
.
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Hmmm, maybe next time I go to the cafe I should ask for a decaf...

I hope you are more original with your policies...

Hang on, hang on.

Haven't I seen that somewhere before?


Obama! You dastardly thief!

I hope Bob and his gang of anthropomorphised work-vehicles and equipment sue his presidential pants off!

Drama! Absurdity! The Occult! Welcome to 21st century communications policy

I hate to make a point with a sledgehammer, but Has anyone seen that play The ISP-Level Filter Trial The Crucible?

Well, according to Wiki, the play begins with revelations that most Australians some village girls may have dabbled in a bit of teh un-legal online activities witchcraft.

These were apparently enabled by off-shore hosted servers Tituba, one of the village family’s slaves, from Barbados.

Stephen Conroy Reverend John Hale is summoned to look into the incident. He is an expert in nothing occultist phenomena and is eager to put into practice a completely disproportionate response his acquired learning.

He questions the other village girls, who, in an attempt to avoid being deemed a pr0n-watcher witch, profess a blacklist of websites people they’ve seen with bit-torrent software the Devil.

The play then tells of a descent into hysteria and injustice as Conroy the villagers accuses everyone else others in an attempt to save his reputation themselves. Anyone who dissents against the irrational and deeply flawed ISP-level filtering witchcraft trials are labelled perverts witches, thus undermining any rational criticism of the trials.

As the bureaucrats Danforth says in Senate Estimates Act III, “an ISP person is either with this filtering trial court or he must be counted as having something to hide against it.”

The filteringwitch trials are the ultimate expression of knee-jerk, politically driven madness intolerance (and the resulting cut in broadband speeds hanging witches is the ultimate irony, coming from the Broadband Minister means of restoring the community's purity); the trials brand all free speech advocates social deviants with the taint of child-pr0n devil-worship and thus necessitate their elimination from the debate community.

Hysteria supplants logic and enables Conroy people to believe that everyday Australianstheir neighbours, whom they have always considered upstanding people, are committing absurd and unbelievable online crimes — communing with the file sharersdevil, killing babies, and so on.

As we all know, The ISP-Level Filter Trial The Crucible is symbolic of the religious right’s 1950s American paranoia about moral decay communism and illustrates narrow-mindedness, excessive zeal and disregard for the individual that characterised the government’s effort to secure Stephen Fielding’s support in the Senate stamp out a perceived social ill.

Should be coming to a desktop theatre near you shortly!

You won't be able to Don't miss it!

Have you heard of the youtube?*

I'm sure by now everyone's typed "Single ladies" into youtube and been blown away by random people recreating, with varying degrees of success, the lip-smacking choreography in Beyonce's film clip.

If not, for shame! And get thee clicky-clicky on this, this and this, stat!

But to add that, check out this clip of 'j-setting', dubbed over with Unk's Walk it Out (said to be Beyonce's inspiration):

As well as being 100% youtubey goodness, it also solves a long-running mystery for me - just where did Jane Turner get the inspiration for Kath Day-Knight's moves!

*Title taken from real life question asked of me about a year ago, by someone who pretends to know about computers. Oh the hilarity!

Je ne regrette rien

So it's roughly a year since we upped sticks and moved back to Sydney.

I could probably deliberate for a few hours on the costs and rewards, the things (and people) missed and the (very) hard-won gains, the lost opportunities and the surprise windfalls.

But it really all comes down to one simple fact.

Right now, at this very minute, summernats is on, and I'm not in Canberra.

As the French would say, w00t!