Mechanisation

It's been a long time coming. Sarah Palin hit the scene and I stopped blogging for the month of September. Spring ist gesprungen and my fingers are red with ink and blood. October is truly the cruellest month. And you know what? I still have to refer to spellcheck to get the word 'hierarchy' right. Unlike my students, most of whom seem ok with the term. Unfortunately, their work is swamped on complimentary terms, sugar coded images and heavily impacting ideas. Thusly I must digress.

Columnist Crushing

He writes columns about his kids and the weirdness of approaching middle age and still I've never been able to help quietly loving Richard Glover. And this piece, from the Fair Go Fairfax site, suggests that I was right all along: ' To his credit, Glover told listeners how embarrassed he was his column was appearing in a strike-breaking paper.' For those enthused by Politics/Web 2.0, there's a petition on the site.

Question is, are all such randomly scattered columnist affections vindicated by this heroic move by G-Love? What would that ghastly Tory A.A. Gill do -- apart from write in a beautifully jaded and digressive style about all the plebian fuss? I'm off to do some constructive drinking with a phalanx of non-AAP journalists.

Massive Family Feud

Sometimes life throws up blog-appropriate conundra.

So, tonight, my sister and I betook ourselves to eat dinner with our grandfather, Elder Statesman, Pater Familias, All Round Good Guy. Our dinners are regular and generally good-humoured.

This evening, however, a problem arose, one which mapped uneasily onto a generation gap. The sticking point is the definition of the words 'next Wednesday.'

'I'll see you next Wednesday.'

If spoken on a Monday, these words apparently make available two interpretations.

Firstly, I'll see you in two days. Secondly, I'll see you next week, on Wednesday.

My own preference is strongly for the latter. Two days after Monday is clearly this Wednesday. Only one staff member surveyed at the Welcome Hotel in Balmain agreed with my grandfather's opposing point of view. The rest, more, shall we say, generationally aligned with my sister and I, agreed that next Wednesday is next Wednesday. There are many reasons to go to the Welcome Hotel -- the date and fig tart and the thing they do with beans and butter being just two -- but this evening, the most compelling is the general sharpness of the staff.

Does anyone disagree? Is next Wednesday actually this Wednesday? Surely not...

Update

I resolve to return to blogging as soon as spring settles in. The glorious dusky pink orchid on my desk will no doubt wither but I'm expecting otherwise a riot of fecundity. Being able to cycle without frosty scarlet fingers, iced drinks, summer fruits: these I anticipate eagerly. Not to mention the end of semester. At the end of Week 4, I'd be happy to accelerate into StuVac.

Anyway.

Here's a list of items that won't be accompanying me on my first major athletics undertaking, the Mudgee Half-Marathon.

1. Skins. Patented tight compression performance gear: not ready for it.
2. Protein gels. Late adopter speaking here.
3. Glasses that don't bounce.
4. Confidence about the weather, distance, possibility for survival.
5. Sufficient knowledge of warm-down stretches.

If this blog is never updated again, fear not the nuclear winter but the demise of your correspondent. Folly, etc.

Egads

I've been caught in a moebius strip and hence unable to access the real loop that is popular culture. If I'd been in the hula-loop, I would've known earlier that a new film version of Brideshead Revisited was in the works. No Jeremy Irons. Why would they supplant a perfectly swishy mini-series with a new film? Without Jeremy Irons. The British press think it's rubbish. Pre-emptive bias pushes me in that direction too.

Couldn't have put it better myself

Razer on Bruni.

I think the last line clinches it:

'May her fragile voice and poor drug analogies return the great republic to its benign leftist lords.'

Marchons, etc.

Neo-sybarites

As I've had numerous occasions to assert over the past week, pilgrim infested as it has been, I'm not a religious person. If, however, I was a third party to L. Ron Hubbard and Philip K. Dick's alleged wager about the establishment of a religion, here are just a few of the practices I would endorse.

• The drinking of Bloody Marys. Particularly on a Sunday. (For the particular display of piety, the concentration of chili should be increased.)
• The consumption of sashimi on the couch. (Raw foods. Anti-oxidants. A nutritional church. Yea. Yea verily. O.)
• The close study of the sacred texts of our Doctor. (Any references to the Tardis in discussions of property in Sydney being blasphemous.)

ALl of the above in close temporal proximity = holiness.

Speaking of the Doctor, another screen must shortly mesmerise me.

Yea. Yea verily. O.

Can you help?

I'm still not unconvinced that is not the work of a grown toy-artist cum nostalgist rather than a charmingly distressed young person. Still, the telephone poles of Crown St were bedecked with this plea for help and on the off-chance that it's serious, I feel compelled to post it.
I particularly like the fact that the teddy can be recognised by virtue of wearing clothes.

Citoyens!

I've seen many flags waved around Sydney today but, alas, not enough en tricolore.

For this the Bastille was stormed?

Ah yes, a secular revolution.

On Bastille Day 2008, may I commend the wise principle of the separation of church and state to the Government of NSW?

I am quite certain that the principles of secularity do not admit funding a junket for the next generation of one of the world's wealthiest institutions. We may have complained about corporate junkets, but they hold not a candle to that of the Vatican. Not only is the Catholic Church the proprietor of a hefty property portfolio in Australia, they are exempt from taxation. And now? Now we shovel public funds into an event that is shaping up as an enormous public nuisance for the non-Catholic population of Sydney.

There's a curious and enduring vein of Francophilia that runs through Sydney's cultural life. Wonderful people, the French. I think we could take more from the Gauls than a few cloves of garlic and maybe start leaving God - all the Gods - out of public life. First step, exclusionary carnivals. Next on the agenda, faith based schools.

Memo

The Pilgrim's Progress is a Protestant text. It was written by John Bunyan in the late seventeenth century in an environment of intense political and religious turmoil. It is an allegorical text which recounts the spiritual journey of a single pilgrim, imaginatively named Christian. He encounters an evangelist who sets him on the path of deliverance.

It is therefore largely unsuitable to any discussion of World Youth Day.

Authors of headlines and op-eds, please take note. A Christian allegory slightly more appropriate to a discussion of World Youth Day is Dante's Divine Comedy. I suspect that the first section, Inferno, will be on the minds of commuters on Thursday.

Here endeth the lesson.