Dear Reader,

Princess was in this place called The City tonight, doing some of her charity work. Tess had the wagon, driving some of her girlfriends around in search of a cool time, so it fell upon me to drive in and pick Princess up at nine thirty, when all her charity was scheduled to run out.

I took the wormhole in [that's the Eastern Freeway - Ed], and then snuck down this dirt track called Nicholson Street. I was getting toward the glitzy Victoria Parade end of things when everything suddenly livened up.

It’s hot, OK? Quite hot. So hot that my keyboard’s USB cable has gone all soft and flexible. So hot that my studio smells of the scented candle that’s not even lit. So hot that everyone in The City was driving with their windows down and their danders up.

As i’m crawling with the traffic down Nicholson, there’s all of a sudden this screaming. Some guy in the park there was going off his fricken head.

“Mwaa! Grrerp! Yeeearrrrch!”

Which got everyone’s attention.

“Hey! Hey! Mwaagreerunngngngngngng!”

Which got everyone annoyed.

“Hey, you!” Some guy in a red car yelled back. “Shut the fuck up!”

“Myaaaark! Gruuuuuung! Heeeeeeyerng! I’ve got a gun! I’ve got a gun!”

I was pretty sceptical that he had a gun for real. But this city has a history of crazy bastards taking out their inadequacies on innocent people in cars.

But i wasn’t worried enough to ziz up my windows. Not just yet.

People were walking around on the intersection ahead. Some one and a nother person had collaborated in a car accident, an achievement in which they seemed to now have only a dubious pride. There were suddenly sirens and ambulances everywhere.

“Hey! Hey! I’m HERE!” screamed the crazy bastard with the putative gun. He took off his shirt and lay down in the middle of Nicholson Street, hoping to attract some of the flashing light attention that was going around. “I’m HERE, you cunts! HERE!”

The traffic lights turned green and i drove carefully around the busted up cars, away from the crazy bastard’s attempt at psychotic Brechtian street theatre.

I parked a bit of a way up a dusty side lane called Brunswick Street and waited for Princess to ring me and tell me where exactly in the general area she was.

While i waited, a girl in a bikini walked past.

It was, remember, half past nine at night. And i was in The City; the inner suburbs part of The City. Generally not the usual place you find girls in bikinis.

Still, it’s hot, and people do some weird-arse things in the heat.

A few moments after the bikini girl shimmied past, all boobs-in-bags and naked belly, Princess rang and told me where she was. I walked there (it was only about five minutes away), and we kissed and i told her about all of my adventures as we walked back to Amber.

“See how exciting it is here in The City?” she said.

“Yeah. Shit i’m glad i don’t live here.”

Yours parochially,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Looks like we have to have terrorgasms about the heat now.

A reporter from The Age went down and filmed some interesting sorts on Melbourne’s Kerferd Road [topless] beach about how they thought it best to keep cool.

If you want to see this video, you have to click here, cos Analpress won’t let me embed it.

Seems the solution to being hot this weekend is to go to the beach. Oh, yes. The beach is the place to be. Mm-hmm. Especially if you ask people who are sitting on a beach.

This is actually a Surfer’s Paradise beach,
in case you were planning on booking a flight

Kerferd Road [topless] beach is our preferred local beach. It’s about an hour’s drive away.

An hour’s drive through sticky, hot, sweaty, ugly urban landscapes, where everyone in their cars is one microsecond away from baseball-bat road rage.

Then, when you get there, you have to find somewhere to park. Parking is generally ticketed, with a 15 minute limit.

Parking in side streets is a great option; doing so will enable you to see your car being towed away, if you don’t have a local resident’s parking permit.

So.

I’ll go straight away and get Princess and Tess to tog up and we’ll go to the beach to cool down and relax…

Getting naked/near-naked beneath the blazing sun
sure equals cooling and relaxing

…or we could sit in our air-conditioned home theatre and catch up on Flashforward…

Tough choice.

How are you spending Melbourne’s hottest-ever™ November (wherever you may be)?

Yours climatically,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

At the moment i’m living in that curious moment between Mister Widget downsizing his factory from a little village community to a room full of nerds who hate each other, and the realisation that he can just sell the office and have us nerds all work from home in our underpants.

So i still have to put up with having other people around during the day. People who aren’t Princess, and thus missing out on all the benefits that having Princess around affords.

It kind of sucks.

Today was Remembrance Day.

We’re supposed to have a minute’s silence and remember the glorious war dead.

With all these nerds who hate me and each other.

So: awkward.

Me: So how are we going to do the minute’s silence and stuff?

Accounts: Maybe we could just be silent for a minute? Duh.

Shipping: Maybe we could have a whole day’s silence, starting now, you chatty cunts.

Accounts: Yeah, shut the fuck up, Gully.

Time went by.

Me: Hey, look! The Australian War Memorial website has an MP3 of the Last Post, and Rouse and Reveille… we could play those and have a minute’s silence in between.

Shipping: Hey, maybe you could just shut the fuck up?

Marketing: Gully, why don’t you download the files, burn them onto a CD, like a podcast, and then we can each have our minute’s silence when it’s most convenient.

Accounts: Yeah, that’s a great idea. You do that, Gully.

I didn’t do that.

I saw on a documentary that the last person to be killed – officially – in The Great War was a French infantry runner, or messenger dude. His job at twenty to eleven on the 11th of November, 1918, was to run along the French trenches to let everyone know that after the cessation of hostilities at 11am there would be soup served at a field kitchen that was about to be set up for just that purpose.

A sniper killed him as he was running along, crying, “Soup for Elevenses, chaps!” in French.

Lots of people got killed on the last day of World War One, but their deaths were all recorded as being on the 10th, so that there would be no issue about their loved ones getting a war-hero-widow’s pension (as opposed to an ex-serviceman’s-widow’s pension, which was nothing, really).

I wonder if that French runner dude had loved ones.

Every man who saw his duty and did it when the choice was before him has had his share in the destruction of the most maleficent Power that ever afflicted mankind. The Australian people will recognise that to them they owe their safety, that through them their honour stands high among the free peoples of the world. Peace that has been won by so much suffering and so many tears must be honoured by a new spirit of fraternity and public service. The flower of this generation has perished. Their loss is irreplaceable, but their sacrifice makes an unanswerable appeal for the democracy they have honoured and preserved.
Sydney Morning Herald 12/11/1918

We now keep meeting small or large parties of British or French prisoners moving west on their way home. What a splendid mood they must be in compared with us.
In spite of it all, we can be proud of the performance we put up, and we shall always be proud of it. Never before has a nation, a single army, had the whole world against it and stood its ground against such overwhelming odds; had it been the other way round, this heroic performance could never have been achieved by any other nation. We protected our homeland from her enemies – they never pushed as far as German territory.
Herbert Sulzbach 13/11/1918

Peace is rapidly dissolving into the light of common day. You can go to London without meeting more than two drunk soldiers; only an occasional crowd blocks the street. But mentally the change is marked too. Instead of feeling that the whole people, willing or not, were concentrated on a single point, one feels now that the whole bunch has burst asunder and flown off with the utmost vigour in different directions. We are once more a nation of individuals.
Virginia Woolf 15/11/1918

source

Yours fire-ceasingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Princess headed off on an adventure earlier this evening, and she decided to drive to this adventure in my car [Amber], on account of how Amber uses less fuel than her station-wagon, and we’re trying to save the planet and all that bullshit.

I went out to wave her off, on account of how we’re close, and fond of each other, and so on and so forth.

We kissed through the open car window with the engine running, and she pulled out into the street. As she changed to second, it occurred to me to ask if i could have a Magnum, the same as she’d had for dessert. You know, on account of how she might be reserving the Magnums [Magna?] for something that i was unaware of.

“Sure, Honey,” she called back, accelerating away, “Have two if you want.” She clutched for the change to third, a good way down the street now. “And make sure you ask Tess for a headjob, too…”

And then she was in third and gone. By fourth she was far too far away for me to check on what i’d heard.

I went back inside the house.

Tess was lying on the couch under the aircon, trying to keep cool in jogging shorts that gaped open at her upper thighs, and a tank top that left her well ventilated. Big Bang was playing on the disk. Sheldon was enjoying the company of Leonard’s mother, the psychoanalyst.

“Tess,” i began, a little uncertainly. “What did you and Princess do today?”

She paused the hilarity. “Princess did a shitload of washing and i helped her hang it out. Why? Is this an OCD thing?”

“No… Did you do anything else?”

She thought about it for a second. “Oh, we made slice.”

“What sort of slice?”

“Hedgehog.”

“Cool. Could i have a Hedgehog, please?”

Awkward moment: averted.

Hedgehog

0.5 cup butter
0.5 cup sugar
3 tbsps cocoa
1 egg (chicken)
250g Marie™ biscuits

Place butter, sugar, and cocoa in a saucepan over low heat. Undo blouse.
Stir occasionally and when sugar is dissolved, remove blouse and take saucepan off heat. Add egg.
Combine with crushed biscuits while unclasping bra. Press mixture into flat tin and remove bra.
When mixture is cool, ice with chocolate icing and cut into squares while jiggling naked breasts.
Variation: 0.75 cup mixed fruit and nuts may be added.

Chocolate icing

1.0 cup icing sugar
2 tbsps grated chocolate or 1 tbsp cocoa
1.5 tbsps water (desalinated)

Sift sugar and put in saucepan with chocolate or cocoa while removing pants.
Add the water and stir till warm, removing undies.
Pour over slice butt naked while doing a little dance.

Allow to set and serve, cowgirl style.

Yours psychoanalytically,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I had this dream last night that i was driving a tractor through this house but it was really a horse i was driving or should i say riding and i know this because i could hear and feel its feet thumping down on the floorboards and plus it drifted when i pulled it up to a standstill the way a horse will and a tractor just plain won’t because it can’t and i rode a horse recently and it felt just like that except that it was a tractor in the dream and not just any old tractor but my pa’s old blue tractor that he parked under the cypress trees and that he used to give me rides on when i was still in nappies and i know for a fact that it was that tractor and not the red tractor that i learnt to drive on at the apple orchard and i know that it wasn’t the red tractor even though i’ve been driving my car through the parking lot at work lately just like i used to drive the red tractor with it mumbling along in second gear in a long swooping arc that minimises stopping because stopping would mean having to wrestle the big bastard gearstick back down to first and lurch away from a standstill which was hard enough to do unladen and especially hard to do with the added bonus of having to lurch away without dropping the half-tonne apple bin balanced on the fork at the back…

So i think this means that a horse with a name something to do with tractors, or houses, or apples, or forklifts is going to win the Cup.

Sorry i couldn’t narrow it down a bit more for you.

Yours puntingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I read with some delight in the The Age’s A2 section that there was to be a book fair practically in my backyard!

OMGSQUEE!

So i loaded Princess into the car and off we headed for Ferny Creek Recreation Centre Hall.

In my head i was envisaging something akin to the collectibles group orgy that they have at the Camberwell Civic Centre. Acres and acres of rare and exciting finds spread thickly through gallery after gallery of an enormous, high-roofed cathedral…

It was a town hall, in a clearing surrounded by towering mountain ash and serviced by rough and gravelly axle-threatening roads.

Inside were eight or nine booksellers selling the sort of things that you might find in the Ferntree Gully Guides Hall during the Village carpark festival of commerce and lameness.

It was underwhelming.

Probably because i’m not a collector.

The vintage cookbooks seller pictured had a visit from a Serious Collector. He was all the way from Amexico, where he had once been one of the four people in the world with the four best collections in the world of poultry cookbooks. In the world.

“We were all in this cut-throat competition with each other,” he drawled, “trying to have THE best collection of poultry cookbooks in the world, until this one guy had a heart attack and decided he didn’t wanna do it any more, so i bought his collection. Then this other guy dropped dead, and i got his collection, and the last guy got some money troubles, so i bought his collection, too. So then i decided the fun had gone out of it, on account of how i now had THE best collection of poultry cookbooks in the world, so i donated the lot to a university library.”

He took a breath.

“And they set the collection up in its own room and everything, and people could come and enjoy the world’s best collection of poultry cookbooks in the world at their leezhure, until some bright spark decided that the collection should be integrated with the rest of the collection, so that’s what they did. But then they messed up the cataloguing and the books are all spread out everywhere. So we’re tryin’ to get enough poultry cookbook collectors together to recatalogue the whole lot and put things to right…”

Which confused me, cos i thought that all the poultry cookbook collectors had died, except for him.

Maybe he speaks in schools to, you know, drum up interest in the great crime being committed against poultry cookbooks.

Aside from vintage cookbooks, you could also snap up some musty old war memoirs, some musty old letters from the Goldfields, or some musty old Enid Blytons – one of the latter of which some enterprising soul had scanned and spiral bound, reselling the (presumably out-of-copyright) work for $60!

You could also buy a copy of Angela’s Ashes and turf it into the bin.

Except that somebody beat you to it.

Which is what collecting books is all about, apparently.

Yours bookishly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Princess and me went to Aldi and bought almost fifty bucks’ worth of Halloween candy, right? Based on the reasonable belief that we were about to be inundated with hobgoblins and subterranean ne’er-do-wells.

We carefully chose the lollies so that there were no nuts that would kill some hobgoblin with anaphylaxis issues, and no unwrapped sugary treats that could harbour needles or poisons.

We were very considerate Halloween citizens.

Know how many hobgoblins we were visited by?

Four.

All in one hit, at about nine o’clock at night.

Normally Princess doles out the loot, to stop the kids gorging themselves inappropriately, or to stop the teenagers in the sexy nurse costumes taking all the good bits and leaving nothing of any worth for the primary schoolers wrapped in toilet paper.

But last night she just let the kids help themselves.

It was underwhelming.

And then, as the kids were leaving, one of them ran into Neville, our concrete Aborigine statue, in the dark, and nearly broke her hobgoblin neck.

Terrific.

So then we were left with a shitload of Halloween treats and no-one to take them.

“Maybe i could go around to people’s houses,” i offered, “And knock on the door and ask if they have any children who’d like some lollies…”

Princess didn’t think that was such a good idea.

A little later in the night, some drunk teenagers wandered down the street, suggesting to the suburb in a dull roar that something about fucking chocolate, and something else about fucking something else.

I was going to run out to them and offer them some Halloween cheer in the form of lollies, but i was already undressed for bed, so i didn’t.

Yours paganly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

You’ve probably been beside yourself with concern as to why i’ve been off the air for nearly two whole weeks!

No?

Ok. That’s cool.

I’ve been involved in some exciting side projects is about all i can say at this time…

Which is meant to make me sound all sophisticated and exotic and artistic and shit… but it probably just makes me sound like a self-involved wanker.

I’ve got some bizzle going down over the next little while, and then it’ll be November, the traditional month for pretentious interblog wankers to sit down and toss off their annual novel in daily spurts of a thousand words or so.

Meh.

Despite the fact that i’m a card-carrying pretentious interblog wanker, i don’t think i’ll be doing that.

So, anyways, this is just a quickie to let you know that i’m still not dead, and that the novel writing is coming along as you might expect.

Yours procrastinatingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I’m a big fan of Marieke (rhymes with “freak”) Hardy.

She’s smart, clever, and intelligent. Here’s a picture of her with her boobs sticking out.

She’s also way bookish, and writerly, and novelish. Here’s a picture of her with an anti-computer.

She’s just written “Australia’s first m-book”, which means one of two things: The Age is still using its usual standards of research, or none of the other m-books written in this country count.

An “m-book”, BTW, is a serialised short story that you squint at on your mobile phone.

In the real world, an m-book is sent via SMS, at 140 characters an ejaculation. In the world of Marieke Hardy’s m-book, it is sent to your web-enabled smartphone 340 words at a time.

For the privilege of being covered by that ejaculate, you pay 55 cents a (working)day for four weeks, totalling eleven dollars australian for a seven thousand word short story (coincidentally [?] the traditional length of a “New Yorker” style short, as pioneered by Dorothy Parker back in the 20s).

i never noticed before how much Marieke looks like Aunty Dot…

It occurs to me that someone with a web-enabled smartphone could probably also just point their browser at a website that was dealing out such ejaculations into an RSS feed, set up to release once a day.

I could do that, and i could do it for free.

I’m not saying that Marieke is a SELL-OUT, cos she’s so deep inside the text industry already that she sold out long ago. No, that’s not what i’m concerned about here. Nor am i concerned about the much-advertised Death of Books™.

No.

What i’m concerned about is nothing, really. I just find it interesting that the business model for the m-book seems to be based on the same business model that allows you to subscribe to bikini-girl wallpapers, as advertised on the back of certain magazines.

You know: scams.

It occurs to me that anyone with an iPhone or any similar smartphone could download a free e-book for, well, free, and read that instead.

So why wouldn’t they?

For the same reason that people pay to have bikini-girl wallpapers sent to their phone? Because they’re technologically inept and don’t know how to transfer freely downloaded bikini-girl wallpapers onto their phones?

…or no-bikini-girls-who’ve-just-been-fucked-by-Zeus-in-the-form-of-a-swan wallpapers, for that matter.

Curious.

Just for fun, i might write a seven thousand word short story and set it up on a WordPress blog to spurt out one 340 word episode a day, for free. Just to see what happens.

Probably nothing.

I’ll make it about something that’s sure to “sell” (sex), and i’ll tie in some new technologies. You know, like the telephone.

Should be a hit.

Yours eptly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I saw Hey Hey, even though it’s uncool to admit it, and i thought the Jackson Jive skit was well in keeping with everything that show has ever stood for.

If you don’t want a faceful of shit, as the saying goes, stay away from the monkey cage.

It was strange watching the show with Tess; she had no idea what any of it was meant to mean.

“Is that the original set?”

“No, but the original sets were always garishly coloured like that.”

“Okay. And why isn’t the bird moving its beak when it talks?”

“I think Ernie Carrol is about ninety years old. He probably has crippling arthiritis.”

“And why isn’t Somers moving his face when he talks?”

“I think that’s botox…”

We watched the infamous skit and – while not particularly funny – it was clever, especially when you take into account that twenty years ago when they first did the skit Michael Jackson was in “blackface” like his brothers, but now he was in “whiteface”.

Cutting political comment, right there.

After all, it wasn’t Australia that made Michael Jackson so ashamed of his african-amexican heritage that he concocted a story about having some rare skin-whitening disease.

No, that was some other country.

Happily, Harry Connick Jr. was on hand to clear up any confusion over how his country had been working for decades to “try to not make black people look like buffoons”.

An unfortunate phrase that implies they are buffoons, but his nation has tried to cover it up. But then i guess he is a singer, not a talker.

Sadly for his street cred, Connick appeared less than decades ago in a clip which clearly shows him (while not in blackface) enjoying a jape at the expense of his “coloured” brothers… or is that “brethren”?

December 1996 – Opening skit to MadTV. Harry Connick, Jr. and Orlando Jones
A spoof featuring a black baptist minister named Rev. LaMonte Nixon Fatback and a white southern evangelical preacher named Dr. Michael Kassick. Some people seem to be confused about which actor is playing which character. For the record the actor playing Rev. LaMonte Nixon Fatback is Orlando Jones and the actor playing Dr. Michael Kassick is Harry Connick Jr.
[EMBEDDING DISABLED BY REQUEST - CLICK FOR CLIP]

Yeah, i watched that film clip and it was chock full of respect for the african-amexicans, and didn’t show even a shadow of buffoonising.

Oh, hang on. No. The opposite to what i just said.

So OK, we Australians have fucked up our relations with our own “black” people (as Harry Connick Jr. calls people with dark skin), but at least we don’t go over to other people’s cultures and tell them what is and isn’t the right way to behave with regard to the people we’ve been treating badly for nearly two centuries. That would be pretty dog of us, don’t you think?

Maybe the Amexicans can have a think about that.

And how would the skit have even worked without the players being in face paint? Or is it just entirely off limits to make comedy (however appallingly lame) out of people that the Amexicans feel guilty about?

I guess their idea of “freedom of speech” comes with terms and conditions.

How awful for them.

Yours in cultural sensitivity,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I think the big theme/s for my magnum opi will be liminality.

It occurred to me the other night (while i was lying in bed thinking about things) that three of the four best-sellers i’m planning to write involve characters situated on the border between land and sea. And along with that borderality goes a heavy dose of neither-here-nor-thereness.

So at the mome i’m reading up on liminality like a pink bitch.

The sound you can hear is the clicking together of ideas inside my head.

yours liminally,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

As promised, i skived a few days off “work” and went down to the Island with Princess and Tess, ostensibly to “get away from it all”, but actually to research a writing project i’m currently slow-cooking in the fevered crock pot of my brain.

I woke up this morning and mentioned to Princess how my head was full of ideas, all running over each other, clamouring like fingerlings in a trout farm breeding pond.

“Well, what are they, these thoughts? Would it help if you told me about them?”

“Punkin, if my problem was that i had too many thoughts in my head, listing them out wouldn’t really help, would it?”

“It sometimes helps to share problems. You know that.”

“These aren’t problems. They’re just ideas,” i assured her, and slowly the discussion moved on to other things.

[It was stupid of me to have said that out loud, about having a head full of ideas. Sunday mornings are historically bad for me in the matter of such areas. Back when i was sick (my coy euphemism for the year or two when i was inexplicably constantly wracked by severe anxiety complexes; a time when i basically had to sit helplessly and watch myself unravelling), Sundays were the worst. Sunday is too far away from the Routines. Now, i have my OCD to keep me sane, but evenso Sundays are still problematic, since it is still too far away from the Routines. I've built Sunday Routines, sure, but for some reason they generally don't seem to work...]

So now i have an SD card full of reference images, and my head is full of setting and place [you can discuss between yourself the difference betwixt setting and place, dear Reader], and ideas for new characters as well.

The problem now, then, is to find what i want this writing project, this Text, to be About.

The Theme.

I know what i want to happen in the story (it is, of course, a fictional narrative, and not a treatise on the shipwrecks of Westernport), and i know who i want it all to happen to, and how, but now, with my head full of the smells and sounds of mangrove swamps and surf shops, the story is mutating.

Anyway. Just thought i’d share that with you.

As well as reference photos of streets and houses and beaches and laneways and sanddunes, i also have other snapshots that i intend sharing with you, just as soon as i can get my shit together in that area.

Sadly, none of these snapshots are of Tess wringing wet and nipply in her togs, staring down a wild pelican half her size with beakish designs on her lunch, or of Princess – stark naked – flinging open the blind to our room on Thursday morning only to discover that we now had neighbours who hadn’t been there the night before.

More’s the pity.

Yours littorally,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Tess is doing a Humanities course at Uni, and one requirement she is forced to comply with is that she must do side subjects that widen her perspective on life.

On account of how a Humanities curriculum is so narrow-minded, apparently.

So she’s signed on to do this media subject, hoping that it would involve watching Bladerunner and waxing lyrical about unicorns.

Cos she likes unicorns, and waxing.

Instead, she was given this assignment to “revisit the dialectic of co-dependent annihilation in 1980s video games”.

As an essay.

“Are you allowed to use pictures?” i asked.

“No. They said they didn’t want us to become distracted by producing artwork. It has to be about the… the way the ideas and the genres sort of… interact with…”

“I would use the word ‘trope’ at that point.”

“Okay. It’s about the trope. It’s the Constitution, it’s Mabo, it’s the trope…”

So she went online and researched games like Space Invaders and Galaga, and now she’s “synthesising” the “trope elements” to produce a “post-9/11″ reworking of the “Cold War era heuristic narratives” of 1980s space warfare sims.

I suggested she look at Pacman instead, and she said that she was keeping that in reserve in case there’s an assignment on post-feminist stereotyping in popular media iconography.

Which there’s sure to be, let’s face it.

Yours simultaneously defensively and offensively,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

As you know, the amexicans who own Vegemite have now decided that they also wanted to own cheese mixed into Vegemite, so they made this terrible spread that goes off so quickly they can only produce it in jars the size of your thumb.

This was such a half-baked idea that they didn’t even come up with a name for it. They decided instead to make it some sort of reality show, where anonymous morons send in random names for the shitty new spread.

I believe i’ve mentioned here that i firmly believe (in my capacity as an anonymous moron) they should have called it “Vegemould”, on account of how it goes mouldy now, instead of having a shelf-life of twenty years as Vegemite does.

But they didn’t listen to me, so the winning survivor of the reality show was “iSnack 2.0″.

Fucked. Up.

The 7PM Project are now holding a reality show to come up with a worse name.

I thought about it, and then i realised i couldn’t come up with a worse name.

Yours iconically,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Thanks to Mister Widget running the business even further into the ground as part of his response to the GFC, i was able to take a DDO (Discretionary Day Off) on Thursday to attend the Royal Melbourne Show with Princess and Sybylla.

The Show has long been a Bogan tradition. It showcases everything that is tacky and tawdry about our society, and crams it in alongside some farm animals tended to by dumbarse hicks from East Poondock, South Gippsland.

The Government tried to fuck up the Show, and set about knocking down buildings and selling off land to further that noble ambition. After all, they reasoned, the Show is about kids 3 – 6 years old getting the chance to cuddle a lamb, so let’s bulldoze all the things that are not about that.

Despite their bulldozer approach to honouring Melbourne’s cultural heritage, you can still find, at the site of the former Show, some tackiness, some tawdriness, and some downright fun things to do. Which was what the Show was really all about.

But don’t tell the Government that people are still having low-brow, non-lamb-cuddling fun, or they’ll shut the thing down for good. As they threatened they would if they weren’t allowed to pursue their bulldoze and sell-off “remedy”.

Cunts.

Anyways. We invited Tess along, figuring she’d love to come.

“What, the Show Show? The one with the lamb cuddling and shit?”

“Yeah. We usually spend a day in there, checking everything out…”

“It takes you a day to cuddle a lamb?”

“Well, there’s rides, and exhibitions, and performances, and… food… and stuff…”

“Sounds like fun.” Sarcasm.

Eventually we convinced her to come. I think she was a bit sensitive about it on account of how her parents have essentially abandoned her to pursue a farming lifestyle. But i may be wrong about that.

Best of all, it was a chance for her to hang out with Sybylla, who hasn’t really met her properly yet.

We bought the tickets at Woolworths the day before, caught the train in, and we were standing in the Showgrounds one hour and twenty minutes after we caught the train at Gully Station. Friends told me earlier in the week they’d bought tickets online, and – when they turned up at the Show carpark to pick up their tickets – found that they still had to queue up to collect them! Result: it took them ONE HOUR standing in a queue IN THE CARPARK before they had their tickets to even start their day. And that after having driven through GRIDLOCK for an HOUR to get to the carpark in the first place.

That’s a ticketing/infrastructure FAIL, Show organisers. A FAIL.

So we did the Show. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that Tess had a great time, and even went on some rides. All right, one ride. And she sort of lost one of her Volleys as she was spinning around on this ride, but it didn’t hit anyone in the head, and she did get it back in the end.

all Volleys in place in this shot…

Oh, and we saw Chris from Masterchef, and he talked with Sybylla about using beer in cooking, on account of how he’s this big aficionado on beer cooking and shit, and he’s even in this secret society of beer aficionados, called the Beer Masons. Sybylla asked if she had to expose her right breast to join, and he said that that was the Freemasons, which was an entirely different deal, but if she wanted to expose her right breast, that was fine by him.

So everyone had a fantastic time, and everything was great, and Sybylla and Tess were getting to know each other, and Tess even milked a cow, and it was all happy memories… and then the Bush Games started.

The Bush Games is not some sort of 80s porno VHS Olympics parody, but rather a bunch of cowboys (“cowboys” in the sense of “people who are reckless and foolhardy”) fucking around on the Coca-Cola Arena with horses and quad bikes.

Even that was going terrifically until one of their reckless japes ended with a horse and rider – at full gallop – coming a cropper.

In front of a stunned audience of 3 – 6 year olds who’d spent the day cuddling lambs, the horsey crashed to the ground, its rider spilled onto the churned dirt of the arena track, and then – horribly, in agonising slow motion – the horse tried to stand up again, its front offside leg sticking out in what could only have been searing pain.

The horse looked confused, confronted with its leg so strange and unresponsive. The rider was up and gesturing to the audience that he was fine, but that really didn’t interest us all that much. We knew – or some of us in the audience did, at least – that if the horse’s leg was broken, then it would have to be put down.

The “horse response team”, as the Bozo MC called them, came to the aid of the horse, but it was too little, too late. That horse standing up there, all alone with its leg sticking out, made me feel like we apes had betrayed it completely. If the worst had happened, all we apes could offer it was a bullet to the brain.

I felt so ashamed of my species.

The horse left the arena, hobbling on three legs and besided by other horses and riders from that “horse response team”, and the Bozo said later on in the idiotic performance that it had been “checked by the vet” and, while rather bruised, was “fine”.

Princess, who was almost in tears, said, “As if they’d tell us that they’d had to put it down…”

The evening fell a little flat after that, even with the world’s two gayest cowboys (“cowboys” in the sense of “two grown men riding horses, one wrapped in battery-powered glow-rope and the other swinging a burning rope around his fucking head”) following on after the Bush Games disaster.

There was some other miserable stuff, mostly to do with C&W singing and fireworks, but if you’ve read this far, then i won’t keep you any longer. You’ve got other things to do.

Yours agriculturally,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

As we speak, there’s a show on the telly in which they are openly attacking the bogan ethnic minority.

It’s called “The Spearman Experiment” (because “20 to 1″ was already taken), and it features fat chick Magda Szubanski being racist toward us bogans.

According to Her Flatulence, to define a bogan, it’s best to consider what a bogan isn’t.

What a bogan isn’t

Culture
+ Sophistication
+ Style
+ Sensible, economical car
= non-bogan.

What a bogan is

Culture
+ Sophistication
+ Style
+ Bright orange V8 Monaro
= bogan.

Hilarious.

As Pete from Rove commented, in direct opposition to all this racial hatred: “You’re either a bogan, or a wanker: time to choose sides.”

Which side do you choose, dear Reader?

Anyway. Next week they’ll do “The Spearman Experiment: Cashed up Jews”, i’m sure.

Because. It’s. The. Same. Thing.

And how ironic that Magda was in the news recently when Dead-eyes Kyle Sandilands commented that she should have gone to a Nazi Concentration Camp instead of wasting her time with Weight Watchers.

V. ironic.

OK. Sick of that.

Friday night Tess brought home a giggling girlfriend and they straight away asked if they could borrow the Pringlescope. Their plan was to drive to Flinders (where it would be nice and dark) and view the might and majesty of the heavens.

I suggested they try it in the backyard first instead.

So they did.

They were underwhelmed.

Until i showed them the moons of Jupiter, that is.

On Wednesday night they were like this:        .    o      .

On Friday night they were like this:       o  .  .  .

Which proves that they do move. And quite a bit, too.

At first the girls thought that the dots were just lens flare, but it turned out that i convinced them otherwise.

Despite the underwhelment they were anticipating (her girlfriend commented, when i whipped it out, “Gee, it’s tiny!”, which is something you don’t ever want to hear a girl say when you’ve just whipped something out) they were intrigued. Tess is now looking forward to a night when she’s home (i.e. here) and the Moon’s out.

The Moon’s out tonight, but she’s off at a party somewhere.

Yours persecuted ethnically,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

You may remember that i’ve been following the increasing girth of Sandersync’s partner as she hoved towards birth.

Well, guess what?

She’s now gone from this:

to this

Isn’t that wonderful?

They were overdue, but the first one is always a bit overdue.

Click on the bub’s nose to leave a message of joy.

Yours avuncularly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

The sky was finally clear enough last night for the Pringlescope’s first adventure.

There was still a bit of a bong cloud blowing over the Gully from Boronia way, but that’s always there, and there’s nothing can be really done about it.

I surveyed the sky for likely points of interest, and the most obvious target on that moonless night was the bright star almost directly overhead.

It was clearly a planet, either Venus or Jupiter.

If it was Jupiter, then when i trained my powerful Pringlescope on it, i fully expected to see this in the viewhole…

Sadly, what i saw was more the size, shape, and colour of this letter o, but with (excitingly) two smaller companion points of light, one to each side.

Like this:            .    o      .

So i wondered – if it was Jupiter – if they were two of the Jovian (or Medici, or Galileian) moons.

I checked the planet tables in the The Age later and it was Jupiter. Which was a bit of a let down.

I was hoping to see a bit of colour at least.

The best thing about the Pringlescope is that it doesn’t have a finder. I have to sort of stand half upside down and sight along the tube to get the thing pointed into the roughly correct part of the sky. Then i have to make little sweeps until something pops into view.

It’s pretty exciting.

See, most “normal” telescopes you just point at what you want to look at, and look at it. With a Dobsonian Pringlescope, you look at right angles to where you’re… looking.

It’s complicated.

here the viewer is looking at the girl, not the bird – simple!

here the viewer looks at ninety degrees to where he’s looking while the beardy guy explains why they can’t see any naked ladies – “it’s probably the light pollution from those christmas lights over the street…”

So i had one small, blurry Jupiter and some mosquito bites to show for my first adventure among the stars.

Sweet!

Yours jovially,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

A few years ago (1984) some obscure academic was making an address to a bunch of Rotarians in Warrnambool, and the main point of his little after-dinner speech was to say that Asians were going to take over Australia unless we did something about it.

The “we” he was referring to would have been other white men like him, i would be guessing.

So this made him famous overnight. On account of being a racist cunt.

Rarely in the history of the modern world has a nation given such preference to a tiny ethnic minority of its population as the Australian Government has done in the past few years, making that minority the favoured majority in its immigration policy,

quoth he. It is unclear how “Asians” (one third of the world’s population) could be described as “a tiny ethnic minority,” but there you go.

People were shocked by this stunning piece of xenophobia from someone who had a locker in the Professor’s change room at a University, so he followed up his little rant with a piece in The Age:

I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny … As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better.

He coined the term “Asianisation,” and became the poster-geezer for racial intolerance and anti-Asian redneckery. He went on to be shunned by his University, and so he wrote a book called “All for Australia,” which apparently sold well in the sort of regional bookshops that also stock a wide range of feral pig hunting magazines.

Blainey was the guy’s name, and he was an expert in History. Believe it or not.

Hilariously, in 2005, this remarkable xenophobe had a Chair in History named after him at the University of Melbourne, where, two decades earlier, students protesting his racist views forced him to cancel his lecture series on “How to Hate Asians Like a Proper White Man” because of fears for his safety.

He was in the paper again today, this prick.

Prof Geoffrey Blainey said one of the biggest changes over the past 50 years was the astonishing improvement in pronunciation and grammar.

“That clearly has come from television and radio and films, not from what’s been taught in schools,” he told the Herald Sun.

Prof Blainey said earlier generations used to say things like “them days” and “all of youses”.

“I’m not criticising them, that’s what they learned in childhood, but that old grammar has virtually vanished,” he said. “Even when you listen to the footballers today, they all speak well.”

And for “that old grammar” read “that bad grammar.”

Not content with attacking Asian people, he has now turned his interests toward linguistic eugenics.

Oh, yes, Professor. Let’s all talk like pompous stuck up ponces with plums in our mouths and our tongue up Queen Victoria’s sphincter.

You know, the way *you* talk.

Personally, i find that “old grammar” you deride so readily as being the domain of the uneducated (note the reference to footballers who – when you’re a Historian – are uneducated thugs with nary a braincell to rub together) to be a defining aspect of my ethnic background.

As an Historian, you would probably realise that we Australian-English speakers have only been developing our dialect for a little over two hundred years. We’ve just started differentiating our tongue from Nanna England, and now you want us to be stripped of this uniqueness and turned into TV-English speakers instead?

How about you just fuck off back to your History Wars and leave us alone.

(The History Wars, dear Reader, are over whether or not we non-Aborigine Australians should hate the Aborigine Australians. He’s pro hate, BTW, in case you couldn’t guess.)

The article reporting all this senile ranting concludes to reassure the glancers of the Herald-Sun that Blainey hasn’t given up hating Asians, and wanting to warn us of their threat to our way of life.

Prof Blainey said he was also very concerned about universities becoming export industries and feeling pressure not to fail full fee-paying foreign students.

For “full fee-paying foreign students” read “Asian students.”

Why are we hearing from this washed-up old Jingoist? Well, he’s just been nominated by the National Trust as one of Australia’s “100 national Living Treasures.”

I. Shit. You. Not.

Yours multiculturally,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

For the first time since she moved in with us, Tess was home at night!

She didn’t go out to a party, sleep over with friends, or have to attend some gathering of her secret society of Uni associates in a stormwater drain or something.

And, of course, this was the night that Princess had to attend some gathering of her secret society of charity associates in a stormwater drain or something.

So it was just me and Tess.

I cooked dinner (a vegetable lentil curry with salad) and she said that it was almost as nice as take-away.

“What’s the secret spice you’ve used?” she asked as she poked at the mound of food in front of her with her fork.

“Curry?” i suggested.

“No,” she decided. “Something else.”

“Coconut milk and coriander?”

“Could be. Maybe that’s the difference between the curries i make and the ones professionals make. My curries are usually just fried onions and curry powder stirred through canned tomatoes.”

I was quite proud that she’d described my curry as ‘professional,’ even though it was totally amateur.

I *had* used a recipe, though. Which made it semi-professional.

She did the dishes – very intensely – and i tidied up.

Then there was an awkward moment when the dishes were all finished and she stood in front of me, almost formally, and said, “good night,” like it was part of a ceremony or something. I half expected her to bow. And then she went to bed. Or to her bedroom, at least.

I think it was the fact that it was just the two of us in the house, without the social lubricant of Princess, that made it a little awkward.

Generally we’re getting on quite well, i think.

I wonder what she thinks.

Yours awkwardly,
Gullybogan