gullybogan

FERNTREE GULLY

Ferntree Gully is a medium-sized village in the verdant foothills of the delightful Dandenong Ranges, on the leafy eastern outskirts of Greater Metropolitan Marvellous Melbourne, a major city of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Ferntree Gully Village has two coffee shops, three opp shops, two fish and chip shops, three or so hairdressers, two bakery-type places, two milkbars, an Irish pub, an American-themed 1950s-style hamburger joint, a cemetery, and a Secret Men’s Business Counselling Service.

It’s a lovely place, Ferntree Gully, and that’s enough said about that.

GULLYBOGAN

Gullybogan is a man of mystery.

No-one exactly knows what he looks like, but, judging by his tracks, he’s around five to six feet tall, with a sort of loping, bipedal gait and a collection of what appear to be both internal and external organs.

He doesn’t eat chickens, dead or alive, so they’re no good to use for bait. Best stick to pastas, even though they tend to slide off the trip-plate of most commercially available traps. He can also be brought down with poisoned Chinese food, cricket bats, or leather balls. Best results are achieved employing all at once.

His favourite drink is hot chocolate, unless he has retired for the evening, in which case he is likely to relax with a UDL Gin and Tonic which he drinks from a water tumbler in order to disguise his borderline alcoholism from housemates.

For a bogan he is remarkably well educated, and, when not asleep, he enjoys reading, writing, and arithmetic, although not arithmetic.

He has been known to use words, and has a vocabulary of many hundreds of words that you yourself may already know. Words like ‘also’ and ‘there’. He sometimes uses words that he himself does not know or understand. In fact, this is what he mostly does all the time.

He uses the words ‘in order’ too much, mostly in order to fix up poorly constructed sentences, but sometimes just gratuitously. The same with ‘that’, which he enjoys using, to the extent that he once built a random that generator that he hoped would help ease that burden of remembering that that is that useful word that can be used on that many occasions that it’s not even that funny.

The best way to understand this mythical dweller of the foothills and forest paths of the Dandenongs is to read his WordPress blog. And that’s that.

PRINCESS

Kind and loving towards the gentle forest folk who look to her as a mother figure, Princess is well and truly loved by all, and makes a fine addition to any About page.

Spending most of her time engaged in charitable works, or conducting medical experiments on the mentally infirm, Princess is a deadly shot with a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and can take the spade out of an Ace of Spades at 300 metres.

She once killed a magpie with a sheet of glass, just cos of the way it was looking at her funny with its beady little eyes.

When travelling on our sphere, she tends to leave a trail of angel-dust in her wake, and can be readily identified by this rare skin condition. Specialists are stumped.

Princess has a favourite colour, and enjoys a good hot water bottle. When drinking, she likes her drink to be made from the dried leaves of camellia bushes, picked by low-paid third world subsistence labourers. She would rather this be served in a cup, and not in a hot water bottle.

Princess tolerates Gullybogan because she is such a good and wonderful person. There is no other feasible explanation for this phenomenon, although orgones may be involved.

THIS BLOG

Dorothy Parker had a lot to say about a lot of things, and so does this blog. There’s no other link between this blog and Dorothy Parker, but by mentioning the name ‘Dorothy Parker’ several times on the About page of this blog, it is hoped that someone googling for Dorothy Parker will accidentally land on this blog, read a few posts, and fall madly in love with the delightfully idiosyncratic writing style of this blog, which is very little like the idiosyncratic writing style of Dorothy Parker, as this blog doesn’t hate life and nor does it resent those who have found happiness, the way poor miserable old Auntie Dot did.

This blog has noticed how ugly the words “this blog” are if you repeat them over and over.

This blog hopes to finally set the record straight on global warming, and to find a route to lasting peace in the Middle East (or, from the perspective of this blog, the Far Distant North West).

This blog is not so much a podcast as a poocast.

This blog is based on a true story.

This blog will occasionally hit-whore by using base strategies such as linking to images of girls with no clothes on, tagging posts with ‘nipples’, and using words like ‘clitoris’ and phrases such as ‘autoerotic asphyxiation’.

This blog will stop hit-whoring like that when the ppl using the interweb stop spending all their time looking for websites with pictures of girls with no clothes on, looking for posts tagged with ‘nipples’, and googling words and phrases such as ‘clitoris’ and ‘autoerotic asphyxiation’.

This blog has had the greatest hit-whore success with users googling the phrase ‘hip tattoo’, and some lesser success with users who are googling ’shannon tweed nude’. There was a brief period where ‘betty and veronica porn’ was the highest search hit this blog was experiencing, but Betty and Veronica seem to have lost their porn cachet.

This blog’s About page was line edited about sixteen fricken times. No, make that seventeen.

This blog wears a grey flannel shirt.

This blog enjoys the musical stylings of AC/DC.

This blog spent its teen years thinking that ‘mix tape’ meant that you made a tape in which you mixed up the order of the songs on ‘Back in Black’.

This blog uses both single and double quotes, sometimes at random. There is a pattern, although it may be a random pattern, which is still a pattern; it’s a pattern where there’s no pattern.

This blog just had a really good idea, but then forgot it completely.

This blog just remembered that the really good idea it had and then forgot completely was to say that this blog thinks of itself as totally subversive, but hopes that it doesn’t upset anyone with its subversiveness, as it really cares what other blogs think about it.

This blog has only ever cried once when reading a book, but it won’t tell you which book because you’ll just laugh.

This blog occasionally refers to itself in the third person.

This blog is written in the open source language English, using free software on a computer that cost a hundred and twenty bucks, a keyboard that cost ten bucks at Safeway, a multicoloured glowing ‘gaming’ mouse that was a xmas present, and a monitor that was once a prop in a play and which was given away free when the play ended to save someone lugging it to the skip.

This blog assumes that you understand Australian words, like ’skip’, which may be a local dialect word for those big dump bin things that trucks come and take away, or it may be a word universally understood, even on the Kalahari.

This blog is initially spell-checked using a printed 1923 dictionary, which is why this blog uses the word ‘oleomargarine’ so much, but has trouble spelling ’sputnik’ and ‘bikini’ and ‘teenager’, none of which existed in 1923.

This blog has to move a small, framed picture of Jules Lefebvre’s lesser known nude ‘La Cigale’ every time it has to spell check a word, as that picture is on the bookshelf in front of the 1923 dictionary, and there’s no other possible place to put the picture, even though the dictionary is the most used book in the bookcase, and, in fact, in the whole room.

This blog is a little concerned that the 1923 dictionary is starting to fall apart.

This blog one time had this incredible sixty-nine with this totally hawt she-blog, and is dying to tell you all about it, but this blog is too sexually repressed to come right out and tell the story, and, anyway, like you’d believe that the she-blog did the whole thing with her chewing gum stuck behind her ear because when she was little her mum told her to be careful not to ever swallow her chewing gum or it would tie her intestines up in knots and she’d die, and if she died while having this incredible sixty-nine with this blog, the coroner would find all the ejaculate from this blog in her tummy, and then all the blogs working at the blog morgue would laugh at her, right over her dead she-blog body, and then they’d all probably blog frankly and mercilessly about her having suffered blog-death from a fellatio-induced chewing gum accident, and google would cache all their blog posts about her and the way that she died and that would be that.

This blog tends to rant.

This blog has an acquired brain injury affecting its frontal lobes, which makes it hard for this blog to perceive the possible consequences of its actions.

This blog isn’t a slave to The Man.

This blog isn’t hoping to get a book deal.

This blog isn’t ‘for’ anything. This blog just is.

This blog stole those last two really nice sentences from David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, substituting “this blog” for Malouf’s “a life”, and possibly changing the tense. This blog wanted to finish this About page with those two really nice sentences, but figured it would be more honest to say that they were a ‘pop culture reference’, or ‘plagiarism’, and not an original thought at all. Like how ‘the blog in the grey flannel shirt’ is a ‘pop culture reference’ to the novel and film The Man in the grey flannel suit, except this blog believes that that’s more of a literary allusion, and not really plagiarism at all.

This blog is guaranteed 100% post-modern, which makes it as modern as you can get. Or not. Depending on who you talk to.