It goes without saying that I'm a fan of Ms Fits' wit on the World Wide Webster. You might have recognised the influence of her humorous operandi on my last post, I guess. (But for the record, she nicked the telegram format from me. And I called dibs on Miranda Airey-Branson. Not that I'm not bitter.)
For the last 76 Fridays, Ms Fits has prosecuted the herculean task of answering each and every inane reader question asked during the week. I believe it is some sort of exercise in self-flagellation, but heroic in its own way and she really does deserve a medal for it.
As consistently amusing as these Friday Q&A's are, at times her blanket policy of being nice to her interrogators leads to word choices that are slightly, well, less than ingenuous. In an idle moment, I made an incomplete list of her code-phrases—provided here for those who want to know what she really thinks of your question.
I don't see why not.
→ No.
Yes, I suppose...
→ Not on your life.
Of course you should...
→ Pull your finger out.
Of course you shouldn't...
→ Get over it, drama queen.
I hope you don't mind...
→ That was an unmitigated display of bad taste. I am going to cover for you.
I don't mind at all.
→ We are all suffering due to your proximity.
Thank-you for taking an interest...
→ Don't be creepy.
...however...
→ I have strayed from the fence and I must return.
I'd probably try it at least once.
→ Ew. Ew!
Goodness me.
→ Do you ever shut up?
Oh dear.
→ Really fucked it up this time, huh?
May I borrow it?
→ Hmpf. Don't be funnier than me on my own goddamn site.
Yes. Let's have a drink together.
→ *rolls eyes*
You're right.
→ You narrowly avoided a yawning abyss of wrong there.
Call me old-fashioned...
→ I feel sick to my stomach.
I really don't know about...
→ Christ, who thinks up this drivel?
I am quite a busy lady...
→ You're like Buckley rolling through Hell on a snowball, mack.
When their team is doing relatively well, Essendon Football Club members are known to complain about the difficulty in getting a seat at their 52,000-capacity home ground in Melbourne's docklands. They point out that getting a ticket was easier at the old home ground, the G, which can withstand a hundred-odd thousand bums on seats.
By all standards of sporting popularity (except international adoption), the Australian Football League is a massive institution: the rival of any soccer or baseball competition in the world. And it has been steadily growing up since emerging from the chrysalis of the Victorian Football League twenty years ago. God help the tourist in a Melbourne winter who refuses to see a game.
Despite its already substantial girth, it suffers from growing pains. There is a shackle of tradition, almost unquestionable tradition, sometimes called 'community', that is often at odds with the media and merchandising behemoth that each club dreams of becoming (and that their overseas cousins in other codes have long since become). The consequence is that sometimes, clubs unwittingly parody themselves.
No club is more adept at this unintended self-deprecation than my own team, Essendon. To wit, I would like to present a gallery of images that have been published on their website this season.
One of the greatest players ever to don the red-and-black, former captain James Hird, painting a homage to (I guess) Roger Merrett.
Three of the Bombers' finest.
Please. Make it stop.
Warning: the next one is the greatest photo related to football EVER.
Kevin Sheedy, who as a rugged defender invented the now standard back-spinning handball, and who in twenty-seven unfinished years as coach of Essendon has remoulded the game in his own image... dressed as a geisha girl.
Shortly after it grows dark in Carringbush, every night but Monday, the walls of my office begin to pulse yellow and oily brown. The light source is a line of flashing bulbs overhanging the place across the street, whose Algerian typeface on the window improbably announces 'Cafe Dreams'. It's a squat building with Turkish proprietors who make the best doner kebabs this side of the upside-down river—if you don't mind pudgy naked fingers squishing chunks of lamb flesh onto skewers and laying them to flame. Be sure to order double-meat. Otherwise you'll just be back for seconds.
The interior of Cafe Dreams is lit up fluorescent, with white laminate tiles only former inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast could love. The power meter buzzes incessantly, emitting an occasional tick-whirr. Sweet Uludağ sits beside the Coke in the fridge, and foreign newsletters wait on the tables. Down past the hot foods bain-marie there's another counter with aspirations to grocery, where among other things you can purchase a slab of Cadbury's Turkish Delight for five bucks. You'd think that might be insulting, but nobody seems to mind.
Beyond the makeshift grocery is a pool table. Around mid-week this is where the Carringbush bruvvers come to split balls and make noise with sharp laughter and baleful looks. If one of them calls out to you while you're waiting for your kebab, wave him over and lock thumbs. Wish him luck in the game. For fucks sake hold his gaze and nod and disengage when it's time. But don't be intimidated; it's all performed with precarious innocence and good humour.
A stucco wall separates the pool game from the inner sanctum. At any time of night there's seven or eight moustachioed taxi drivers taking time out from criss-crossing the city to watch the Süper Lig, and chew cigarettes and the fat in roughly equal quantities. This is a sanctuary beyond the preserve of us—were it not for this lounge, from which the proprietors reluctantly detach themselves to answer your custom, the place would surely have shut down long ago. No-one puts up with that much shit unless there's a silver lining.
The shit, arguably, has an obvious origin. Cafe Dreams is the only establishment in Carringbush—the only I know of, at least—that'll sell you an individual cigarette. 60 cents a durry. One can but speculate why they made this business decision, although a Chamberlainian appeasement strategy seems most plausible. There's no question that it's an appalling one. In an average week, every smackie in the 'bush goes through the place, shucking a score of echidna coins for a nicotine hit, or lyrebirds for two. The old woman who distributes the smokes will look at you and cluck her tongue, shake her head and conduct business with what feels like a secret handshake. She sighs because she knows the cat is out of the bag, Pandora's worms have come to roost. Just last night a balding man in his thirties, scabs pocking his face, was crawling around on the laminate, looking for the dollar coin he swears someone dropped a couple of months ago, while his mate ('bush junkies invariably travel in pairs) swapped a handful of silver for two of Peter Jackson's finest.
And last week a bloke pulled a knife out front—in the ensuing scuffle the door was used to bloody his nose. Cafe Dreams is finally anything but, and I sometimes wonder how far it is from what its namer hoped. The appellation promises something that reality seems unlikely to deliver. Maybe that's the point. Still, seriously, you have to try one of those doner kebabs.
There will be a few Windows users who, on the back of this morning's announcement, will be tempted to switch to the Safari web browser.
You can of course sate your curiosity, but if you've done several years hard labour with Internet Explorer at some point in your computing past, you'll appreciate the pitfalls of proprietary browsers. We've been through all this before, and thanks to Firefox (and indeed KHTML, the software on which Apple's "open source" WebKit is based), the days of browsers being handed down from megalithic corporations to lock you into their own particular suite of scams is long gone.
This is just an unfortunate anachronism.
(FYI, yes I currently use and recommend Mac OS X — it's got some "Just Works" mojo that I haven't found even in Ubuntu yet. Plus it's got Quicksilver, the only software I know of with a gooey, chocolatey centre. Furthermore, all our inventions already fully support Safari, and that's not going to change. But I don't use it, and I can't see the point of it — except as aforementioned Trojan Horse.)
I'm intrigued by the widespread indignation that has greeted the announcement of the corporate brand for the London 2012 Olympic Games. There is an ordinary professional scorn as a matter of course for graphic designers whenever identity work of public significance is unveiled. But here it has been subsumed by a greater and much more personal reaction — there is a public atmosphere of grievance, because everyday people who are excited by the event it now heralds feel aggrieved.
This will be an interesting study in corporate obstinacy, and will indicate the extent to which the 'new way' in customer relations has infiltrated big business — wherein brands are 'democratised' in a big push-pull-push action with half-militant, half-brainwashed consumers. I don't know which way it'll go; I do know that the Games corporation will need balls of steel to stick with it. But at least until recently, balls of steel were an essential survival trait in male-dominated, crusading boardrooms.
The software giant will announce at the D5 conference today that it’s built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world... Forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on.
Get your fingers out of the way, Bill — some of us are trying to work.
I'm not the guy you perceive
You tell me that I'm drinking too much
Y'know, I could never believe
You tell me that I'm drinking too much
Go on, pack your bags and leave
