Writing

"hard earned cash" - [i]Especially[/i] when it's applied to Bill Gates as per Ten News this evening. 'Bill Gates is in Australia to part with some of his [i]hard earned[/i] cash...'. Almost as bad as...

and for that matter...

"un-Australian" - Allow me to define this so that we may never use it again. Any Australian who labels another Australian as 'un-Australian' is un-Australian. Hey, wait a minute...
I have the sneaking suspicion that "un-Australian" could be the modern Australian version of "terrorist", or "witch" for that matter. You heard it here first folks.

If anyone ever wanted to see what a sumo gig was like, last Saturday would have been the day to come and watch. Completely typical in every way.

It’s in Marion. It’s always in Marion or Glenelg or Kensington. Places where people feel the pressure of needing to ‘do things’ for their children’s birthday parties and have the money to do it. They always have large station wagons and at least one sparkling clean 4WD. The parties often have theme rooms (think ‘jungle room’ with lots of plants and leopard print or ‘haunted house room’ with black cut out plastic and fake spiders web) and the houses often have a nice extension out the back with a quiet, sunny area that will be both quiet [I]and[/I] sunny once the kids leave home and take all their toys with them.

I arrive, clad in a Hawaiian shirt that says ‘No one would voluntarily wear this, therefore the entertainment has arrived’. I knock on the door and it’s answered by an appropriately hearty dad who likes weekends because he doesn’t have to shave. If it’s summer he’s wearing shorts with a belt and sandals. In winter he wears the same jacket he wears to Saturday morning school sport. As he greets me, the tide of children at a party washes around us. Something new is happening. The Playstation 2 has been turned off, the theme room has become boring. The sumo man has arrived.
Dad directs me towards the area picked out as the wrestling arena. According to the contract it is supposed to be 5 x 5, but that can often mean 5 x 5 metres on bricks, surrounded by expensive pot plants, posts or simply out in the impending rain. Mum usually turns up around about now, wiping her hands from preparing the latest round of treats, and introduces herself as the woman who reluctantly made the booking with my agent. She obviously isn’t too keen on the idea of ten dirty little boys and girls running through the house fuelled by sugar and the idea that wrestling and maybe breaking things is okay. She is about half an hour away from a glass of Riesling. Dad has already started on the Heineken.
As a general rule, the richer the kids are, the less likely they are to be excited about helping me lug my four bags full of sumo suits and wrestling mats from my car. These kids were your run of the mill ‘good kids’.
‘Do you need a hand with your stuff?’ asks Dean (Dad). ‘That’d be great.’ I reply and immediately the entire party has migrated outside and across the road (without looking) to gather around my car and to vie for the honour of humping what amounts to a heavy beanbag sized thing to the back garden.
I follow them out and unpack everything. I move slowly so that I can keep an eye on the ten pairs of sugar-fuelled hands, all willing to help by grabbing, tearing and claiming primacy over a favourite coloured waistband. I unroll the mat and only girls ever help me to get it straight in the middle of the grass.
For those who are still in the dark about what sumo suits [I]are[/I], here’s a quick course:
The sumo suits are large foam bodysuits made to look like sumo wrestlers. People hire them (and me) for parties, functions, fairs, anything that has a 5 x 5 metre area and people willing enough to don the suits and wrestle each other to the ground. Think alcohol. Think hormones (mostly testosterone). Think test of strength and think expensive. Three hours will relieve you of $440, two are around $300. This is divided between my agent, the suit manufacturer and myself, but one still needs a healthy wodge of disposable income to have me in attendance, umpiring the contestants and making sure no one gets injured.

So I’ve unfolded the mat, shown the kids the suits and made everyone sit down and take their shoes and socks off. The birthday boy (or girl, but mostly boy) gets to go first along with his best mate and the two kids wriggle into their suits while the various parents stand around thinking everything from ‘I wonder if I could have a shot’ to ‘This doesn’t look very safe’.
My favourite type of parents are the mothers who stand right by the ring desperately trying to convince their flock of hyperventilating twelve-year-olds to ‘be gentle, take it easy, be careful’. This is almost as good as the Dad who decides that I’m not dressing the kids fast enough and that he’ll come and help. Inevitably, he will always take twice as long as your handsome veteran and I’ll end having to strap the kid’s helmet on the right way anyway. Yet still he persists…
The parents were perfect. They stood out of my way, they told off any kids that needed it and Mum even remembered to offer me a drink.
The kids, unusually, were also great. They organised themselves fairly. No one got hurt and, most shocking of all, when I talked – they listened. Incredible.

Not to say that they didn’t have their fair share of kid’s party personalities. Here is a list of the different personas that pre-teens assign themselves at sumo parties (as far as I have been able to observe in my three years of encouraging children to attack each other):

The Big Kid. Everyone challenges him or her. No one ever wins. They eventually get bored and are cajoled into taking unconvincing dives.
The Little Kid. At the opposite end of the developmental bell curve to The Big Kid. Either shitscared or over confident. Always loses. Never cares as much as …
The Sulker. Future passive-aggressive. If and when they lose, it’s always because they had a ‘sore foot’.
‘What’s the sore foot from kid? Dragging your feet? Tripping over your bottom lip?’
The worst Sulker I’ve ever seen was a twelve-year-old boy who lost to a girl of the same age and then went and sat in the corner of the garden, face in hands, for half and hour. By that stage most of the party had tried to console him without success. The only thing that brought him out was the birthday cake.
The Competitor. Absolutely mad to test his skills and strength against everyone. Already organising a tally of wins and losses in his head for use in perpetuity. ‘Remember when I thumped you four to one in sumo suits!’
‘That was 16 years ago Chris.’
‘And the title still stands!’
The Screamer. Usually a girl, but not always. The scream is usually part of a very limited arsenal.
The Comedian. Knows what a funny voice sounds like from copying adults on TV, but doesn’t know any jokes to use the voice for. I can usually relate best to them because they remind me of me. Consequently they usually find themselves winning due to one-sided refereeing and some pushing and shoving from said ref.

The afternoon contains all of these delightful characters, plus a few normal ten-year-olds who don’t really fit into any category that I can be bothered naming. Good on them, defying definition like that and keeping everyone guessing.
The other thing I can’t fail to mention when talking about sumo-suiting ten-year-olds is the constant raping of the word ‘verse’. I can never help myself when I hear kids screaming at each other ‘I’m gonna verse you, then you verse him!’. I always have to cut in and ask ‘Gonna recite some poetry to him eh?’, which never fails to gain a round of blank stares.

At the conclusion of the afternoon, the clouds roll in right on time and I pack my gear into the car with a little extra help from the greatly reduced crowd of kiddy volunteers. I shake Mum’s hand and promise her that her particular bunch of kids are the best fun I’ve had for ages and I tootle off into the afternoon.

Has anyone else received the latest Johnny W booklet? “Violence Against Women – Australia Says No”
Apparently I missed the referendum…
But enough jokes. I was at Mum and Dad’s yesterday and Mum told me that part of the reason the campaign was postponed was because it contained stuff about emotional violence. Apparently Johnny W didn’t like that too much, so he made them go back and change it so that people wouldn’t have to start thinking about violence within any new frames of reference. I suppose at the time he must have thought that emotional violence was okay because sometimes you have to use it gain military information. To the campaign’s credit though, the booklet (which my household did not receive) does contain a lot of stuff about emotional violence, coercion etc.
I wonder how much it makes a difference. Does the sort of person who psychologically dominates their girlfriend 1) read government information booklets and 2) think it applies to them?
Physical violence is bad enough and the TV ads do a fairly good job of conveying how grey the issue can be (ie. “I don’t hit her, it’s just shoving and that”). But I think a few other ‘stories’ are in order. For example: “She pisses me off so much and I have to yell at her to get the message through. Then she quietens down.” or “He said he’d belt me one if I stayed out late with the girls again”. The serious masculine voice over man would then say “Threats of physical violence are still classed as assault in the eyes of the law.” Or maybe that’s too many syllables.
I also can’t help thinking of where men fit into domestic violence stats. Thanks to the campaign, it’s common knowledge that women are the majority of victims and that too many assaults go unreported. But I wonder how many men are victims of domestic violence? And how does it happen? Why? Under what circumstances? I find it hard to imagine the Andy Cap cliché of the wife in rollers and dressing gown waiting for her boozed up husband with a frying pan. In real life a drunken husband coming home to an aggressive would be statistically more likely to be the one doing the assaulting (or, to quote my hero Homer, ‘Ah, Andy Cap, you wife-beating drunk’).
I don’t suppose my questions will be answered any time soon …

I think I’m about to choke with rage. Either that or smugness. I never realised that ‘John Howard: American Wannabe’ would turn out to be true so quickly! I’m talking, of course, about flag raising in schools. John Howard has threatened to take funding from schools that don’t have a flagpole with the aussie flag up it as of next year (paid for with their own money – no mention of flagpole funding as yet). That doesn’t include private schools by the way, they are left to their own devices as usual.

Actually, no, wait, stop. First I would like to give a big clap and cheer for Johnny W (hey – just like George W, how about that…) for implementing a minimum two hours a week physical exercise in schools for all kids. Good on him – best idea yet.
Back to the flag. I’m sure that they do this in heaps of countries around the world and it’s not an issue, but you can bet your Telstra shares that Johnny W didn’t get the idea from Canada. Once again he has looked wistfully across the Pacific at George’s place and wished that he had a population as willing and unquestioning as the one currently in control of everything (or so they would have us believe). I can almost read his thoughts:
“[i]George’s[/i] people don’t question him! Most of them don’t even vote! Why can’t [i]my[/i] people be like that?”
A population that doesn’t think and doesn’t vote. A prudent politician’s perfect dream. Just imagine – an entire nation all to yourself to mould in your own idyllic image: white picket fences, heterosexual couples raising heterosexual children who will grow up full of Aussie love and brilliant economic strategies (with a little help from the Jim’s Mowing man and maybe a servant or two). Or maybe I’m being too bleak.
One thing is certain: you can’t get there all at once. Baby steps beyond the baby bonus. Flag raising at schools is a good place to jump to next. Don’t be surprised if we see some kind of ‘pledge of allegiance’ next. I’m sure our preamble-penning PM already has a draft pledge tucked away in the bottom bedside drawer at Kirribilli, waiting for the right moment. At first it will be voluntary, then it’ll become tied to funding and then anyone who objects will thrown into Baxter with the rest of the terrorists.
Only now do I realise why John W is so desperate to Americanise Australia. If Australia were more like the US, then Australian’s would be much more likely to vote for him. This whole flag thing is in the same spirit as Howard’s attack on state schools earlier this year, when he accused them of being amoralistic and politically correct (a politician complaining of something being politically correct – what is this suggesting?).
Howard knows that private schools are okay – any organisation teaching a standard of ‘pay your own way’ is okay with him, paedophilia investigations or not. Graduates of private schools are going to enter society with exactly the kind self-interested economic-rationalist morals that the liberal party loves.
State schools are a different manner. Firstly: these kids are poor – they don’t pay their own way, the government has to, so they’re learning that their families don’t necessarily have to have money to succeed. They are also learning that there are other power structures out there (other than Mummy and Daddy) to engage with to ask for help, money and information – these are all costly things for a government to provide. Secondly, they are still learning, and not just how to start up their own lawn-mowing business. State schoolies learn all sorts of pesky, annoying things like questioning authority. Private schoolies are getting this too, but for the majority of them, authority and government is the hand feeding them, so why bite back? Public schools are getting less and less from the government, but they are still being allowed to learn how to think. Thinking leads to unhappiness. Unhappiness leads to democracy. Democracy leads to voting out the liberals because they’ve given such a terrible deal to public schools (and refugees, and universities, and low-income earners, and gay people, and …).
Having a flag flying out the front of school to look at every morning and associate with all the fun and good times of school days is a step towards a patriotic nation. One where Australian means government and un-Australian means terrorist. The last thing Howard wants is another David Marr or Michael Moore brewing out there in state school land. Some bright young disgruntled student reading the paper, figuring out just how much of a raw deal they’re getting and having ideas.
I won’t be surprised if some student much like the one I’ve just described, mad with thought, engaging in an anti-government protest and being expelled for tearing down the flag when this comes in.
I will be surprised to hear this conversation taking place in any primary school across the country.
“Miss – what’s that red and white cross on the corner of the flag?”
“That’s the Union Jack, it’s the British flag.”
“Why do we have another country’s flag in the corner of ours?”
“Because this country was colonised by the British over 200 years ago. We become our own country in 1901 but we kept the British flag in the corner of our own to remind us of our heritage.”
“But we’re Australian aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“So why do we have that flag there?”

In Australia, patriotism should be a matter of choice, not force. If our school children can’t make up their minds about what a girl having two mums really means, then they certainly aren’t old enough to start making decisions about whether our nation is something to be proud of.

See this link for The Age’s forum on this subject. Gotta love The Age. I got an Australian this morning and felt a bit like throwing it under a bus. “…[I]stunning[/I] triple backflip” indeed.

The Age article: [link]
Forum: [link]

=http://img78.photobucket.com/...%20pics/bush_on_terrorist s_in_the_22nd_Century.gif

It’s fantastic to see any corporation being caught off guard. Watching Channel Ten’s primary-school-standard propaganda machine chugging into action around Merlin’s Big Brother protest last week was delicious to say the least. Even if in subsequent appearances he appeared to have been appropriately subdued. I can’t fault the man though; I find myself reaching for the worst our cultural cliché generator has to offer when I try to think of describing words: “guts”, “determination”, “top bloke” and “battler” all spring to mind. Even though the poor man was nervous as all hell when he finally had to face Gretel the next night (I missed him on Rove unfortunately).
No – Channel Ten did a fairly good job of keeping the masses happy over big scary Merlin bringing up nasty political things in front of the kids.
McDonald’s is my other latest favourite. They’ve done a lot of unconscious advertising for the movie Super Size Me’ by running 15 and 30 second ads on TV denouncing it. They refer to Super Size Me as “That Movie” as though it were a dirty little secret, like an illegitimate child.
On their website they provide a list of claims the movie makes and then refutes them, but in such a round about way that they bring up more problems for themselves than they solve. Eg:
“That Movie believes nutrition information is hard to come by.”
“(McDonald’s Australia) has nutrition information readily available in every restaurant, and on our website.”
I checked the website and the nutrition charts are very flashy and weird to navigate. I had to dig quite deep to start finding information about kilojoules, fat content, calories, etc. Even then I was still hard pressed to find information about the actual recommended daily intake. The McDonald’s website is just a lot slippery sliding primary colours. All this flashiness is surely the work of the devil!
“That Movie shows a man following a diet averaging twice his recommend daily intake of calories.”
“McDonald’s Australia would not suggest that anyone eat more than the recommended daily intake of calories.”
But all he did was eat at their restaurant! “I wouldn’t recommend that anyone calling themselves a restaurant sell food that unhealthy!” It’s the same problem with their final refutation, stating “We don’t recommend anyone (eat every meal, every day at Maccas), and suggest you enjoy McDonald’s as part of a well balanced diet.”
I think McDonald’s would have been better off if they had said nothing at all, rather than attempting to draw attention to how ‘healthy’ they are. Any restaurant that provides breakfast, lunch and dinner and then states quite clearly that you should go elsewhere for at least one of those meals is clearly losing it. Which meal should we avoid? I’m dying to know … maybe it’s dinner. What part of the ‘healthy, well balanced diet’ is McDonald’s missing out on? Is it lettuce? Salt? McDonald’s Shortening? (made from Edible Tallow, antioxidant and antifoam) Is it the bottom bit of the food pyramid?

I’m sure I’m not alone when I worry about John Howard’s personal feelings and affinities towards the US and how they might be clouding and distorting his view of what is best for Australia in an Australian climate. The war in Iraq is a prime example. We all took to the streets and said ‘No, bad idea, more evidence please, etc’. The Free Trade Agreement is another. Why why why? I don’t understand it and I’m not alone in feeling that there are enough voices of dissent about the FTA to warrant further public justification and explanation – something like the very happy and friendly Medicare ads we’re getting at the moment. But that’s another thing where I get the feeling that Howard’s government is on their knees every night, praying that no one will start asking questions. I’m not well informed enough, but the complainants voicing their concern are large enough to have me worried – more explanation again please.
The thing that has me the most worried lately is the overall trust that Howard is thrusting toward the US and north American culture in general. My dad heard him the other day talking about the Iraqi war in terms of ‘We must step up to the plate’. Isn’t that ‘Step up to the crease’ Johnny? The link that has started this train of thought is a pair of quotes in the weekend broadsheets. The first I noticed was from the front page story ‘US alliance ‘on the ballot’’ where Howard is discussing our interests in sending aid and troops overseas. He makes a speech on Friday night, saying that Latham’s promise of withdrawing active troops from Iraq is a stupid thing to do and terrorists will start thinking that they’ve won. He says: ‘We cannot put a fence around our country or our region. We cannot withdraw back to the illusion of Fortress Australia.” He’s talking as though our navy were never engaged in turning away boats full of asylum seekers and maintaining boarder security. The thing that irks me about that quote is that I moved from the front page section of The Age to the Weekend Magazine in The Australian and found the US ambassador to Australia, grinning with his many chins and saying ‘I think Americans recognise that there are great issues afoot in the world and that we can’t withdraw to fortress America and hope that they’ll go away.’
What’s with all these fortresses?
Why is our leader echoing American sentiment?
Why is he creating the impression that we [i]have[/i] a fortress? A fortress defending us against who? Shit-scared refugees?

Music. I’m obsessed with it. The first ‘big thing’ I ever saved up for was a ghettoblaster. I spent all my time feeding blank tapes into it and listening to the radio, fingers poised over the ‘record’ button, ears tuned to the first couple of bars of every new song, just in case I liked it and wanted to tape it and keep it forever. I’ve still got all those old tapes, some 20 or so, all lovingly taped from the radio with tracks written down on the cover. Then The Chief got the internet and mp3s were invented. He had Napster and I wanted it too (this was back in the days when it was free). I wasted no time installing it onto my mum’s home computer and began downloading song file after song file. All the music I’d ever meant to get a hold of, but couldn’t afford was available for free. Mum’s computer didn’t have a sound card, but my Dad’s did (we were a three computer household and my computer had neither internet [i]nor[/i] soundcard). So I had to painstakingly compress each mp3 file onto three or four floppy disks, carry them to my Dad’s study and uncompress them again. I downloaded a gig like that, three floppies at a time, that’s about 300 songs for the uninitiated. Then Dad got the internet on his computer. Then I got a CD burner. I was unstoppable. I have almost 20 CDs worth.
(Nb. It occurs to me that the record company boogie men and women could be out to get me now that I’ve said this, but, for the record, none of this is true.)

Now I’m a big boy and I have my own computer with my own internet and my own burner and iTunes. Last time I looked (about 10 seconds ago, considering I’m writing this on that same computer) I had more than 14 days of mp3s on there. Two weeks straight. That’s a lot of music. And it isn’t going anywhere. iTunes is a program that allows you to sort all of your electronic music. You can organise it all into albums and artists and genres and, being the obsessive little hoarder that I am, I can’t resist. All the names have to be the same, letter casings all identical, with everything in order of the right track numbers and sorted by album. An anal-retentive’s dream. 4730 songs is a lot of songs to get sorted properly, but when I do, I feel great. They will be saved for all eternity and anyone looking through them can find anything they want. I don’t imagine I’ll be throwing them away either. They take up no space, they don’t deteriorate with age and they won’t get lost when I move or get thrown away when I realise I haven’t listened to them for a decade (although, that’s mostly due to the fact that I am a hoarder). It occurred to me recently that my children will probably listen to them. Some of the exact same music I’m listening to now must surely become part of the endless wheel of nostalgia with Rage Against The Machine, Nirvana, Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers taking their places in the pantheon of music that gets played an infinite amount of times at weddings, 21st birthday parties and Irish theme pubs. I will, no doubt, be leaping to the dance floor of some function centre to the first, unmistakable bars of [i]Right Here, Right Now[/i] while the catering staff cringe and the next generation plugs their ears and averts their eyes.

This brings me to my question: My generation has the experience of going through our parents’ record and tape collections, pulling out albums and playing them on old machines with visible moving parts. What will the next generation have by way of musical nostalgia and history? The musical things most of young hip things will keep and treasure are CDs and mostly burnt ones at that. The idolisation of individual, marketable pieces like records and special edition artwork and whatever else will be gone. No one will sit around looking at album covers or buying collector’s editions off the net. Easily copied media will take over the world and with it will come the easily copied personal collection. All the music a person ever owned and loved could sit on a single disk or piece of virtual hard drive living in the intangible ether. Our children will only have screens with track listings leading to more screens with more track listings to identify with as the music that shaped their parents’ lives and will go on to shape their own in some way. Perhaps this will be a good thing. No longer will sex and image sell music, the quality of the music will be forced to sell itself; if it’s crap, it’ll die. (Of course this could just be wishful thinking). The kids of tomorrow won’t sit down in front of a glass-fronted cabinet with fingerprints traced in the dust and flick through piles of mysterious old records, laughing at hairdos and shrugging off wincing parents, they’ll sit down in front of a screen somewhere and trawl through scrolling lists of songs and songs and songs. Occasionally they’ll choose one they’ve heard before or one with an interesting name. They’ll listen to the beginning, skip to the middle and then the end if it still holds interest.
The collection of records kept in a crate in the shed will be long gone, even boxes of CDs will sit in the back of a cupboard, taking up space until someone takes them out, backs them up onto a hard drive and drops them into the Sally Army bin. If we want to show our kids what we listened to when we were growing up, we’ll have to sit them down in front of our screen and hold them still while we scroll down all that music we downloaded.

Record companies will figure out a way to make us pay somehow. They’ll stop making ‘products’ and start providing ‘services’. Music won’t be something tangible you can own anymore, you’ll have to sign up for it, like pay TV. Radio-on-Demand. With high speed wireless data connections all over the place, conglomerates of the future (let’s stop calling them just ‘record companies’, because they’re always much more than that and they don’t produce records anyway) won’t need to produce CDs any more than electronics manufacturers today need to produce record players. You like that album? You like the way we’ve pushed that artist? That’ll be fifty cents. That’s right, just fifty small cents to listen to the whole thing, first to last. You want to listen again? That’s another fifty cents sir/madam, we’ll put it right on your monthly access bill. What’s that? You only like tracks 3 and 7? Ten cents each. Now you want numbers 2 and 8? Seven cents. Why were the first two dearer? When we fed the album through our ‘hit detecting’ software those were the songs with highest score. You will be billed. It’s not too hard to imagine one little wireless gadget with an audio out, an extra software application on your mobile phone that you can plug your headphones into, or your stereo amp. Something that keeps a discreet record of everything you listen to (and view, and surf – hell, why not movies too?) and extracts the money from you. The game will get tougher. If your music doesn’t score highly enough on Polyphonic HMI’s software, then you’re out the door. (To find out what I’m talking about – see this BBC story http://www.bbcworld.com/conte...;co_pageid=3 - it’s scary stuff).

But people will still make music. Record companies don’t make music, they sell it. People will still be buying guitars and rocking out in their garages, they’ll still be shitting off their neighbours, parents, flatmates and friends and practising for gigs. Those gigs won’t be at pubs though. It’s pretty common now for most bands to have a computer around the place to do all their mixing on and most agree that whatever’s produced sounds pretty flash. Good recording technology is still pretty prohibitive, but that’s easily hired and in the end, a band can knock out a decent EP for cheap. Electronic artists for even cheaper. In the future, when we all have computer screens sitting in the corners of our homes, or floating around after us projected on walls or into thin air ‘Back to the Future’ style by a series of lenses, bands will email their friends about a gig, set up a few webcams and get set for a live webcast. It’s not so ridiculous. I’d love to see a band performing live over the net. I’m not the only person with a decent set of speakers that I can plug into my computer. All that’s missing is an appropriately high-speed internet connection. In the future a bunch of mates will get the email about the upcoming {insert group name here} gig, they’ll forward the date and time on to their lists and gather at {insert mate with best computer/net/sound set-up here}’s place at the appropriate time, crack on the technology and have a few beers while watching the show. Afterwards, they join in the live chat with the band and someone will whip out their credit card number so that they can download the band’s music then and there. No middleman. Just fans putting money straight into their favourite group’s pocket without the intervention of a slobbering multinational who wants you to pay for the music [i]and[/i] their latest round of layoffs, executive pay-rises and popstar machine fodder.

Our children won’t go to record stores, they’ll go to their screen and keypad with their pocket money credits and we’ll still be confused and scared about the crap they listen to. The Chief and I had a conversation a while ago about our own parents’ whinging about the crap music we listened to. The flavour of the month was Aphex Twin and we were listening to Windowlicker, which, while still being one of his more accessible songs, still contains a lot of nasty bleeps and screeches posing as music. That’s fine when you’ve trained yourself to listen to it, but if not, then it’s truly a nightmare (give [i]Come To Daddy[/i] a listen for an example of the kind of ‘inaccessible&rsquo ; I’m talking about). We got around to the speculation that our children probably would be listening to just straight static. Tuneless, painful, screeching static, like the kind you get when an old TV doesn’t get the signal (not those new TVs that automatically switch to a calming blue screen when this happens). They’ll be in their rooms, grooving out, kicking up, matching dark, cooling time (chose your futuristic buzz-phrase that hasn’t caught on yet) to this ‘music’ and we future parents who were once so musically savvy and above our own parents, will be sipping our herbal tea with gritted teeth while wave after wave of seemingly mindless, meaningless noise thumps through our dwellings. Eventually we will give in. We will forget our promises never to behave like our own parents and to always stay cool and love and respect music forever and charge into their bedrooms and scream ‘Turn that bloody racket off!’.

Don’t say it won’t happen.

Well, here we go.

I read a friend of my parents' blog a couple of months ago and became inspired to start own and so here it is. I haven't quite been able to bring myself to take steps and start one up for a myriad of procrastinating reasons that I won't go into now coz they're boring - but today seems to be the day to start.
Why?
It's a cusp of sorts; I've been sitting at the front desk of the Centre for Asian Studies at Adelaide Uni for the last month and today is (was - it's 7pm) my last day there because the new permanent person starts on Monday. Today is also the day for a couple of fellow students from Masters who went part-time to hand up their manuscripts, warts, wong appostwofees, spewwing ewwors and all. It rained cats, dogs and elephants into the creamy sunset today as I watched from my window in Castle Ligertwood (the Uni Law building) and I was filled with one of those mysterious, creative feelings I get when I’m procrastinating. Or it could have been the couple of beers I had at lunch.

‘It’s time to start a blog. Get writing.’

So I'm finished with this 9 - 5, day in, day out, up too early, home too late stuff and on to other things (like going straight back there next week while the new woman goes off to train on the Syllabus Plus software program). I only realised today that I probably should have started a blog when I started there, as opposed to my last day, considering that I spent a good deal of time (however an undisclosed deal of time, just in case an employer is reading this) doing not much.
The other reason I’m starting a blog is to practise my writing – like a gym membership for the writer in me. It took me a long time into my post-grad to work out that awful truth for all lazy authors: you’ve got to write to write. No good sitting around having good ideas and hiding them in a notebook somewhere if you’re not going to take them out for a test drive. Also it’s not much good being a writer if you’re not writing[i] at least[/i] once a day. I don’t do it. I don’t know a lot of people that can honestly say they do (except for completing masters students – good luck guys), so here is my attempt at it.
The writing I’m imagining that I’ll put up here isn’t the creative, story writing kind, although I can imagine that I will throw up a couple of short pieces from time to time (maybe a serial?). Mostly I’m hoping that this will be a place that I can put up the half essays that I write from time to time on vaguely political things, wanky, self-indulgent diatribes, movie reviews, thoughts on social trends.
I’ve got to be honest with myself here and also say that I don’t really expect people to read this regularly, or even at all. The point is more to have a focal point for my writing, so that when I’m thinking it out on screen, it will always be in my mind that it’s for [i]someone[/i], not just a nothing thing that I won’t have to get serious about. This is like stepping up the trainings per week for a sporting team – I can’t afford to just dribble it out when I feel like it. Now when I have ideas, I (hopefully) will feel impelled to come and write them down.

I greatly admire Jonathon’s blog and his piece that I read about taxi-drivers today was inspiring to say the very least. (His blog is http://homepage.mac.com/shawj... )
I also admire the mass group emails that I’m receiving from a few friends over in the UK at the moment. It’s the exercise of taking the constant stream of life, filtering out the boring bits and sharing them with others, even if there are people out there who can bear to flit through them or just delete them straight off.

The other thing of it (I’m only realising this now, 700 words in), is that it will hopefully teach me to filter out the general amount of crap that I write anyways. I’m a rambler when I talk and I’m a rambler when I write, ‘specially when I’ve had a couple of Coopers green ones. (Speaking of which...)

So – without further ado, congratulations to everyone who ploughed through this far and let’s see if we can’t make it interesting…