Dear federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese,

I understand that you are a bit anxious about the prospect of terrorists blowing planes the fuck out of the sky.

That would be bad.

And i understand that you want to check out – if not in person, then by proxy – whether or not i have explosives strapped to my penis before i get onto a plane, in case i’m a terrorist who is intending to blow the plane the fuck out of the sky by careful application of a loaded penis.

And we both know that, what with my quite sizeable penis, that would be a fuckload of explosives!

But what i can’t understand is why you have to bombard me with X-rays to check my penis for explosives.

I’m quite happy to strip naked and show my penis to any proxy officer you wish to assign the pleasant duty to (i would recommend a female officer, as male officers would obviously have their egos totally crushed at the sight of my enormous appendage), but i’m not willing to receive a dose of radiation just because that is more convenient and expedient for you and your minions.

I don’t mind at all the prospect of blurry images of my enormous cock appearing in the intertube (as happened to Bollywood heart-throb Shah Rukh Khan) as i’m sure much clearer pictures of it are already out there, somewhere.

Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan has debunked the British government’s claims [that images are not kept), telling BBC talk show host Jonathan Ross that he autographed printed scans of his own body for two female security officers.

What i mind is the invasion, not of my so-called “privacy” (whatever that means), but rather the invasion of my body’s cells, the place where the cancers grow when stimulated by things like, say, airport X-ray scanners.

So give me the option: strip naked, or get a dose of radiation.

That’s all i ask.

Oh, and BTW, now that terrorists can no longer strap explosives to their penises, they will no doubt begin swallowing those explosives in condoms, the way drug smugglers do.

Are you going to have an extra strength X-ray scanner to look for that?

Yours enormously,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

So that thing went well on Wednesday, and the head honcho did offer me an impressive amount of money to sell my soul and become one of his zombies, the way i expected him to.

If i’m getting three hundred dollars a week now, he offered me four hundred.

I still said no, even though it was a very generous offer.

But he went off thinking what a brilliant person i am, and all that shit, and no doubt plotting another clever way to lure me into his clutches.

The company zombie that i’m working “under” on this project, on the other hand, was quite circumspect, and had nothing to say about the thing at all.

Later in the afternoon, i started on some work that she’d asked me to do, and i checked with her a bit of the way into it that it was exactly the way she wanted it to be, and she said that it was marvellous and fantastic (she’s always saying that, even when it’s just that i’ve photocopied an invoice for her), so i finished it off, and i went home.

I got home about nine.

This morning, i had a lovely interaction with the baristas at the train station, bought the Green Guide from a street newstand, and i was all positivey about things.

It felt good. I was enjoying myself.

The end.

So company zombie straight came over to my hotdesk before i’d even put down my takeaway hot chocolate, and she asked me if i had any idea what the HELL was going on with the thing i’d worked on for her last night.

I explained that, well, nothing was going on with it other than that it was just exactly the way she had asked for it to be.

For some reason, she was obviously upset (i figured), so i threw in a “sorry”, to help her feel better.

It didn’t help.

“Take all that GARBAGE out of the code, and put it back the way it was,” she demanded, quite put out.

“OK,” i assured her, “I’ll take out all the GARBAGE and put it back the way it was.”

And i did. And then i sent her an e-mail that read: “GARBAGE removed, as requested.”

It was twenty past eight, and my day was ruined.

And then, on the train home, there was this guy sitting opposite me who was so fat that he gave me a sore back. I couldn’t sit straight on my cramped little seat because he overlapped not only the seat beside him and the aisle, but my legroom as well.

It was awkward.

I tried to figure out where he was likely to get off the train, so i could determine whether it was worthwhile moving to another cramped seat, or if doing so would be rude. I tried to remember if there were any towns that i’d noticed had had huge bites taken out of them, but i couldn’t. In the end he got off after Ringwood, so i’d sat with my spine twisted and my legs pressed into each other for three quarters of an hour.

When he got up and walked past me, he hit me in the head with his backpack, because, of course, he fitted the train aisle like the falafel and tabouleh fit a falafel roll.

So that was my day.

[Ed: Harden the fuck up, Gully - these whining rants are becoming tedious. Isn't it about time you did a post that involved tits? or sex? or titsex?]

Yours garbagely,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

As you know, i’m currently deployed on a Special Mission for a Top Secret Organisation, developing widgets that are so Eyes Only that even i don’t know what they do.

And let me tell you: it’s wa-a-a-ay past tedious.

The worst part is the travel. Oh, sure, it gives me heaps of fun stories about the fun times i have riding on the fun train, but when i’m spending three hours a day commuting, and i leave home at six of the clock in the morning and don’t get home until nine of the clock at night, it gets a bit ploddy.

Ploddy, you ask, your ears cocked, your face all quizzical and puppy-dog-eyed?

You know, things slow down. Ploddy.

Time dilates, as with a birth canal.

“Hmmm,” Bub thinks, “That was tedious.”

Like, i’m presently enjoying watching the slo-o-o-ow dissolution of a pile of human shit that some kind soul deposited on the footpath on the way to the Station. Every day it’s a little worse for the elements.

Also, there’s a cardboard box that’s been sitting in a certain doorway in the City now for three weeks…

And at the same time that things are slowing down, they are also speeding up. Frinstance: i was quelle surprised to find that i haven’t posted here since the 8th…

Happily, i finish up on this project on the 25th, and i’ll be back at what’s left of the Widgetplex the day after Australia Day.

And the day after that will be the day Steve Jobs announces the iSlate, or iTablet, or iDrinksTray, or whatever. And then Mister Widget will call us all together and tell us that we’re now going to be upsizing all our iPhone apps to suit the bigger screen…

Translation: tedium.

Tomorrow, at the Secret Mission place, i’m part of a big Presentation to one of the head honchos. If it goes well, word around the water-cooler is that the Top Secret Organisation will try to lure me into their cubicle farm permanently, to help make sure that this new widget (whatever it is, whatever it does) is an on-going success.

Just one of the many lurings and enticements: Naked Friday Sex Chat Club

Lurings and enticements notwithstanding, i can’t imagine anything worse, frankly, than working in the City.

Next time i post, remind me to tell you about how terrible the tucker in the Food Court is.

Yours ennuily,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

This is apparently the one week of the year when it’s best to perform open street surgery on the intersection of two of the Outer Eastern Suburbs’ main arterial lifelines: Springvale Road and the Belgrave/Lilydale train line.

As a consequence, the trains have stopped their regular rhythmic routines of thundering back and forth.

Now, instead, they’re twitching, and going slack, like a just-come cock in a debutante’s tight, moist embrace.

And, just like such a cock, they’re a little shamefaced. After all, the debutante has gone to a lot of trouble.

She’s not just done her hair, she’s had trial hairdos.

She’s spent months finding the right dress, and then as many months worrying about putting on a smidgen of puppy-fat and not being able to fit it, so she’s been trying on that dress every week, just to check.

Her nanna and poppa are back there, in the hall, looking over the array of professional photos on offer, to show their friends down at the bingo, and here you are, cock, in the carpark, inside their grand-daughter’s cunt and finished already.

disclaimer: serving suggestion only
none of these debs were ever fucked in the back of a car

You’re hoping that maybe she won’t figure it out, that it’s over. But she’s starting to wonder where that golden, screaming orgasm that Dolly magazine promised her is, and why you’ve inexplicably stopped before it’s arrived. You decide, cock, just to give her another few thrusts, out of pity, to save face, but the best you can manage is a bit of a pull out and a bit of a poor example of a push back in, already folding in half in the face of her fadingly expectant snugness.

You try again with these limpening faux fuckings, but you can see in her eyes that she knows, now, that you’re just not that into it anymore. You can see in her eyes her downshifting from anticipation of that inner shuddering climactic explosion, down down down to a sullen hope that at least she’ll be spared ending up with blood-stained cum on the tulle lining of the skirt of her beautiful gown.

You give another half-hearted push, but you figure you’re not fooling either of you. Fuck it, you think to yourself, and then chuckle, in a cockish way, at the irony of that choice of words.

So you pull out altogether, cock, trailing your curdy nose across all that tulle, and then your other end lights up a smoke and asks, “Hey, have you got protection?”

Now, if you could choose, i think you’d choose, dear Reader, to be the cock in that little allegory, but, sadly, we commuters had no choice, and we are decidedly not the cock. Oh, no. We were the debutante (just in case you were thinking we might be the tulle).

Granted, the intersection has for a long time been merrily identified by theRACV (an automobile club and car drivers’ advocate) as the most dangerous intersection in our fair(ly good) city.

Granted, lotsa people’ve been kilt there for no real good reason.

I’m all in favour of people not getting kilt.

And if they can fix up the gridlock traffic jams that the boom gates cause, that’d be fine.

What shits me, though, is the guy from the intersection company who went on the TV news and said that it was “Short term pain for long term gain.”

OK. Fine. But i’m not the one getting the gain. I’m just getting the pain.

And the first day they ran the bus replacements, the flotilla of Cold War Era buses they’d trundled back into service out of museums and playgrounds across Victoria were too few, too slow, and too unprepared.

Hordes of zombie-like commuters crowded up to the proffered buses, waiting for the doors to open (zombies can’t open doors, remember). And then buses were dropping zombies people off in the general vicinity of Box Hill (they were meant to go to Blackburn) and the drivers were telling the brain hungry walking dead commuters to find the station themselves, see ya later.

some clever zombies made it all the way to Flinders Street

I rang up Metlink Monday night, and asked if they’d heard of (a) peak hour and (2) the need for proper bus replacement services when you cleave a rail line in twain.

The nice chap i spoke to advised me, and i quote:

You’re best off avoiding the trains altogether. If you can drive to Glen Waverley station or something, that would really be best.

Seriously.

Sadly, i was not prepared to drive to another station, on account of how i don’t like leaving my car sitting in some farflung, benighted suburb that is, for all i know, the haunt of carthieves and paintchippers.

Happily, the next day, everyone else in Ferntree Gully had already made the decision to avoid the Belgrave line like it was beset by zombies, and the carpark at Gully station was completely empty. There were maybe three people on the platform, waiting for the train.

Which ambled in when it damnwell felt like it, regardless of the specially printed timetable.

And even though it was much less crowded and zombieish, and the kerfuffle only added half an hour to my commute, i could go on… but that’s enough of a rant from me, i’m sure you agree.

So, how was your trip home?

Yours commutingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

A group of Amexican “scientists” has wasted a passel of money on finding out something we already know: if you want to have more sex, you have to do more housework.

For almost as long as we’ve been together, Princess and me have referred to doing the dishes as “the foreplay”.

Frinstance. Before coming on here to catch up with you, dear Reader, i helped Princess with the dishes, the sweeping, and the general tidying up of the house. This was for two reasons: (1) it raises the quality and intensity of the bedtime cuddles, and (b) the place was a pigsty.

You will have noted that i said “helped”, rather than “did”. This is a concession to the fact that i’m working two day jobs at the moment. I often just do housework on my own… but enough of this flirting; let’s get on with the study’s findings.

The study has found all manner of things that you can discover for yourself by following this handy link, but here are some of the highlights, with my usual unnecessary personal commentary.

The study shows that sexual frequency [of 7000 Amexican couples] averaged 82.7 times a year, or 1.6 times a week, although there was wide variation. Age and the duration of the relationship dampened sexual frequency, as did being Catholic compared with being Protestant. The presence of small children reduced frequency but older children were positively associated with more frequent sex.

We’re having fewer than three sexual penetrations a fortnight, i can tell you, but we have other tricks up our sleeve, so i’m not too worried about that.

Having Tess around the place, according to the findings, should theoretically drive our penetrations through the roof (i’ll let you visualise that for a moment), but for some reason she’s just not working. I’ll confront her over this at the dinner table tomorrow night.

Women on average did 41.8 hours of housework a week, almost twice as much as the men, and 19.7 hours of paid work, bringing their total labour to 61.5 hours compared with 57.1 hours for men.

I would only do around eight to ten hours housework a week, or up as high as twenty if i do most of the cooking that particular week. That said, Princess probably only does about twenty to thirty (i asked her), and that is often in a couple of big spurts on the weekend (again, i’ll let you visualise that).

I really need a calculator to work this out, but i think that means we should be making the beast with two backs (that’s Shakespeare talk for fucking) about three times a month.

Which is about right.

The study found if slothful women and men – those who did housework for only 16 hours and two hours a week respectively – increased their effort to match the high performers – women who did 68 hours and men 45 hours a week – they could expect to have sex 15 more times a year.

Fifteen hours at around two minutes a time, that’s forty to fifty hours of extra housework A WEEK for an extra half an hour of slippery friction A YEAR.

Yeah, that’s probably worth it.

And when you’re having that extra half hour, you might choose to use the Vortex Vibrations Vacuum Cleaner Sex Toy.

Place Vortex over the clitoris against the labia. Suction will immediately increase blood flow to the clitoris causing it to enlarge and become sensitive.

Move the slider down and the clitoris itself starts to vibrate, fluttering like a reed in a saxophone. By adjusting the slider upward or downward, YOU control the rate of vibration

“Fluttering like a reed in a saxophone”… I’ll let you visualise that for a moment. Or you can go to their shop and watch a video of the Vortex stimulating a balloon, if you prefer.

I’ve seen the video, thanks, and now i have other things to attend to.

Oh, and BTW, there’s nothing sexier than tender, gentle, non-chaffing clitoral stimulation accompanied by the window-rattling roar of a vacuum cleaner… i imagine…

Yours domestically,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

If, like me, you were out frantically looking for Lara Bingle’s stolen $300,000 Aston Martin for her, you can stop looking.

This particular instance of the world’s most unstealable car was found in South Coogee, a few clicks from where the erstwhile-bikini-clad and occasionally topless Lara Bingle had left it sitting in her unlocked garage with the keys in the ignition and a Johnny Farnham CD playing in the stereo.

a distraught Bingle, eyes black-ringed from searching all night for her Aston Martin, realises that someone has also stolen her bikini

Aston Martin claimed – prior to its recovery – that the car is practically unstealable, and that no doubt international jewel thieves in black unitards were behind the theft.

Smart arse car experts were all over the media – prior to its recovery – saying that the car was no doubt snugly ensconced in a shipping container, on its way to Bahrain or somewhere of that ilk.

I haven’t heard what any of them had to say in response to the car turning up apparently dumped after a brief joy ride, probably having been taken by two seventeen year olds named Brian and Dazza.

Cleverly, Lara had turned to the world’s most sophisticated crime-fighting and anti-theft electronics system to retrieve her car.

Twitter.

It didn’t help get the car back, but, then, no one really expected it to.

Happily, her fears that someone had used the vehicle to make a fancy 007-style getaway, like this…

…turned out to be baseless.

Now if she can only track down the master thieves who stole her bikini, her worries are over.

Yours joyridingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

We were all going to go into the CBD to watch the fireworks, but a massive electrical storm was sweeping in, spelling ostensible doom for any human-supplied pyrotechnics, so we stayed home and watched Dawn of the Dead instead.

Turns out, they did run the fireworks, storm or no storm.

Fancy.

Princess woke up this morning proclaiming that she doesn’t want to watch any more zombie movies, as she spent the whole night dreaming about hiding from zombies, and she didn’t like that very much.

I don’t like zombie movies much either. As a person with pathophobia and OCD, zombies are just about my most perfect natural enemy.

I always feel sick after watching a zombie movie; both the horror splatter type, and the so-called “zom coms”. And i’ve seen quite a few of each type now, so i know it’s not just a coincidence.

I don’t know why i watch so many zombie movies, since i hate them so. It’s a bit like guys who poke sticks into the eye of their penis, even though they know that it’s not all that great a sensation. They just can’t help themselves.

So, all you guys poking sticks into the eye of your penis, here’s a suggestion for a new year’s resolution: stop poking sticks into the eye of your penis.

And you zombies? Stop eating brains, OK?

Sheesh!

Yours alive inside,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

The long awaited myki (always lower case, that “m”) ticketing system has finally arrived.

Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky announced the release this afternoon, saying it was an “important step” in the “carefully planned” rollout of myki in Melbourne.

“From today, myki money or myki pass will be valid for travel on all train services operated by Metro and all V/Line services in zones one and two, including Melton and Sunbury,” she said in a statement.

Ms Kosky did not give a date for the myki rollout on trams and buses.

This means anyone who validates a myki card on a train and then tries to use it on a tram or bus will be potentially liable for a $172 fine for travelling without a valid ticket.

myki smartcards are not yet available for purchase at city stores, but people can register online for a free myki pass from 3pm this afternoon.

They are also available from regional centres such as Geelong where the $1.35 billion system was trialled.

The old Metcard ticket system will run alongside myki for at least six months before being shut down. [source]

It would be so easy to say, “Well, i’ll make absolutely sure that i get a myki pass, sometime before the end of next year. Or maybe the year after.”

Except that the closest this government gets to Nazism is when its ticket inspectors confront law-abiding citizens to check and see if they have jumped through all the requisite hoops one must navigate in order to enjoy the privilege of riding on dangerous, over-crowded, late, ill-maintained public transport vehicles.

I’ve seen three acts of senseless violence in my many years riding the PT. Two of those were ticket inspectors “restraining and questioning” hapless commuters. The other was on an unstaffed train platform (FTG) when a drunk guy bashed a fellow commuter for coming to the aid of the Asian person he was harassing.

And don’t even get me started on bus drivers.

I was in the city a few weeks ago. They have people dressed in myki-blue livery handing out myki information leaflets.

They need to hand out leaflets because, like any simple and efficient system, it requires lots of careful explaining.

The guy handing out the leaflets smiled pleasantly and wished everyone walking past, “A very myki Christmas!”

A very myki Christmas.

Humbug.

Happily, my research on the intertube reveals that “myki” is also the name of a Russian porn worker.

So everything works out fine.

Yours commutingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Today we went to see Avatar, but you know that, because you were there.

Everyone in the world went to Knox Ozone today to see Avatar. I took a picture of the queue to show how unbelievably long it was, but it’s a pretty redundant photo, because everyone in the world is in it, so you already know what i’m talking about.

We turned up rather ingenuously at 10:17am for a 10:30am session. That session had well and truly started by the time we got to the ticket selling lady, so we bought tickets for the 1:00pm session instead, and then went and had some brunch.

When we rocked back, the queue for the 1:00pm session was even longer and more frantic than the mid-morning queue had been.

But i knew it was going to be like that, because all morning, in Knox City, i’d heard people walking past saying things like, “Maybe we should buy our tickets for Avatar now, so we don’t have to queue up…”

We sashayed past the milling throngs and swept on toward the cinema, brandishing our precious tickets and flashing our stylish 3D specs at the queuelings.

Once in the cinema, we besat ourselves and dealt with those stylish 3D specs. They warned us on the packaging that we should not use them as sunglasses, but they didn’t warn us that we would need medical attention after wearing them for three hours (the average length of a James Cameron movie). At one point, Princess asked me for a tissue. It was at a particularly poignant moment in the film, so i thought she was in tears over the fate of the animated fictions flickering up there on the wall in front of us. In fact, she needed the tissue to wad between her nose and the specs, to stop the plastic frame digging into the bridge of her nose.

Happily, i’m partially blind, so i had an insulating layer of prescription glasses to protect me from the 3D specs.

Mind you, i found that there was ‘banding’ in the 3D effect, possibly due to the fact that one of my eyes is 30% weaker than the other, and i was getting an unbalanced separation of the z-axis image differentiation.

It was a bit of a headache (literally) to live with for three hours.

The film itself was … well, you’ve seen it, so you know how it was.

Personally, i went for the tits, to be honest.

And i wasn’t disappointed.

The female Navi had some insubstantial strings of beads draped alluringly over their digitally sculpted bosoms, but these not only left little to the imagination, they accommodatingly flopped out of the way so often i found i had no need whatsoever for my imagination. Zoe Saldana, who provides the voice and general character reference for the Ney’tiri female lead shows her own work with insubstantial bosom coverings below.

So there it is. I could pretend that i have a deep and abiding interest in how the Amexicans are dealing with their group guilt over the rape and destruction of both the Native Amexindian peoples and the planet in general, but i’d just be lying. Sure, i’m interested in the fact that, like The Day the Earth Stood Still (redux), the Amexicans are engaging with the fact that the planet is dead, and we killed it, and that when Gaia fixes things up, they may no longer suit us, but i think that Copenhagen was a pretty strong message that we, as a species, lack the imagination to think beyond our selves.

So, tits it was.

Tess and Princess weren’t as interested in the tits, and while Princess – as an Islander – was able to find personal cultural resonance in the tragic spectacle of a people being screwed over by a technologically superior nation of resource-hungry invaders…

… Tess managed to fall asleep, somewhere about the time that the Marine dude was learning to fly his skylizard.

I understand her falling asleep, don’t you? I mean, how hard could learning to fly a skylizard be?

Before we saw it, someone who had seen the movie for their first time (the question is not have you seen it, but rather how many times have you seen it) told us it was like Last of the Mohicans crossed with The Matrix.

Pish and posh.

It’s more like Dances With Wolves crossed with Ferngully.

Seriously, if you haven’t seen Ferngully in a while, take it out and have another look.

You’ll have to use your imagination for the tits on the forest folk, though.

Yours manifestly,
Gullybogan

UPDATE James Cameron has decided that he hasn’t screwed enough mulah out of us, so he’s promised that the DVD/Bluray release of the movie will feature a deleted scene in which we see the newlyweds fucking. Now, we’ve all seen humanoids fucking before, but he’s piquing this bit of prurient interest by offering to let us see how the Na’vi fuck, specifically.

Like, duh, Cameron! We figured that out for ourselves. They connect those ponytail things they have together, naturally.

And their genitalia, of course.

Dear Reader,

Requisite blog-gap apology: Sorry i’ve been silent running the last little while. I’m working with a client who… Well, here’s a story to illustrate.

The client is required to submit daily purchasing data in XML form to a higher authority. He sidelined me to working on that task, since the product they were using to generate that XML kept failing the upload schema. Every time it failed, the computer made this awful, bowel-loosening “BAH-doooooow!” noise. After three days, the client took me aside and said to stop whatever i was doing to fix the problem and turn all my attention instead to changing that alert sound to something more pleasant. Once i’d done that, he put me back onto the main project, and left the XML upload to continue failing, now doing so with the pleasant sound of tweeting birds flying past a waterfall.

I hope that gives you an idea of the magical working environment that has kept me too-frantic-to-blog uberbusy over the last month or so.

Apology accepted? Are we friends again?

And now on to real news.

Tess is almost at the end of her sojourn in Indonesia.

In my mind, she was going to be spending the time riding on bajajs, snacking on street satay, and haggling with market-stall holders over the price of over-sized woven baskets that she’d never be able to get back into the country.

We got an e-mail from her a week or so back. She was, in fact, doing nowt of the like.

First up, almost as soon as she hit the airport, she and her friends set off for the jungle, where they spent a week or so trekking about with a guide wielding a machete, just like in the movies.

This went marvellously, until they were having a break and one of the girls (Elizabeth? Emma?) sat on an ants’ nest by mistake, and became severely stung all over her impish bottom.

That would have been a little unpleasant and yet something she could have risen above, except, of course, that she’s allergic to ant stings, and she started to have a very mild anaphylactic reaction that limited her ability to breathe and stuff.

So the meandering jungle wander turned abruptly into a dash for survival to the nearest helicopter drop zone, which was eight hours away by machete.

After the ride on the emergency helicopter and the short stay in hospital, the girls turned their hands to Good Works.

They managed, via a Good Works foundation that Princess hooked them up with before they left, to find some isolated village where the children had never seen a white person, and where the local school house had fallen down during a big storm.

They attached themselves to a group of Canadian students who were working to rebuild (well, replace) the school house, and spent a week or so in this isolated clearing by the river, getting blisters on hands that were usually accustomed to work no more demanding than tapping at a keyboard or turning the pages of a Jane Austen novel.

Building the new school house was immensely rewarding, she e-wrote, and she now wants to investigate becoming a teacher, since she gave a lesson to the village children on Australia, and they all loved her so.

Her resolve to become a teacher where the wild things are wasn’t diminished by waking one morning in her hammock to find that the itchy feeling in her shorts was a sizeable leech that had attached itself to her vulva and that was, if not sucking her off, exactly, certainly sucking her out.

“A centimetre over and it would have attached to my clit,” she e-wrote gleefully. “At first i thought i’d rubbed up against a poisonous vine or something and that now i was growing a penis. A shiny, black penis. Freud would have been dismayed to learn that this did not please me in the least.”

The leech-penis was duly shown to the other girls so that she could pool ideas as to what to do about it. Elizabeth threw up and Emma swooned. A Canadian student lass by the name of Jacquie remarkably had an A4 page in her fieldtrip notebook she’d printed out in Winnipeg from Wikipedia on removing leeches, and she got it out and started reading through the process.

It involved a rather complicated manoeuvre requiring skilful co-ordination of thumbnails and leech-ends. Jacquie and Elizabeth (the latter feeling much better after her spew) stared at the fat black slug hanging from Tess’s pussy region and decided that they’d try the alternative (but medically inadvisable) process of pouring Coca-Cola™ over it.

When half a can of Coke™ had been sluiced over Tess’s nethers without result, they called in the Indonesian guide, Didi, to get his opinion.

So there was Tess, standing in a clearing in an Indonesian jungle with a leech attached to her privates, her pubes dripping Coke™, and a Javanese man with crooked teeth and a two foot long machete in his belt expertly nipping his fingers about in her crotch.

He flicked the leech away once it was removed, and – with a smile – indicated that she should wash the area free of Coke™ and blood and such, and apply pressure to the area to limit the bleeding.

He also indicated that if it had been attached inside of her (apparently he indicated this attachment location with hand gestures, ringing his thumb and index finger and poking his other index finger through the hole), she may not even have felt it, and it would have required a trip back into “town” and off to the surgery.

All the girls shifted uneasily at this point, clearly trying to detect any internal leech attachments by concentrating really hard on their birth canals.

Tess was something of a leech hero after that, until a boy discovered one on his dick shaft, and then it was his turn for leechy fame.

Apparently a penis-leech beats a leech-penis in the leechy fame stakes.

And that’s just the tales that she’s e-mailing to us and her parents. I can’t wait for her to get back and spill the details on the things that aren’t suitable for mater and pater’s eyes.

Yours parasitically,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I’m confused.

Not so long ago, we were being told that the world is about to shrug humans off her mortal coil, in payback for us having messed up her atmosphere and stuff.

One of the most recent revelations of this developing shit-vs-fan situation being that we here in Victoria are about to add a third and fourth major island to our state’s collection of such things. The rising oceans will, by midway through this century, have cut off Wilsons Prom from the mainland, and the Mornington ‘Peninsula’ will need a nice big bridge at Somerville.

Most of Westernport’s fringe of mangrove swamps will be inundated, and we’ll just plain lose towns like San Remo and Hastings.

By the end of this century, Port Phillip will have invaded most of the flat, volcanic plains between Altona and Geelong, perhaps as far inland as Bacchus Marsh. The remains of the Mornington Peninsula will be an archipelago of minor islets, such as Nepean Island (formerly Point Nepean), Arthurs Seat, Martha Island (formerly Mount Martha), and Red Island (formerly Red Hill). Cape Woolamai on Phillip Island will be Woolamai Island, and French Island will be riven north-south amidships.

And then, apparently, all that doom and gloom just went away.

A few days out from Copenhagen, some hackers have released e-mails that indicate (on a superficial level, which is where politicians live) that all the Global Warming science in the whole world ever has been totally faked and/or manipulated to make it seem like the Earth is heating up, whereas, in fact, it’s cooling down.

And this comes a few days after Australia’s political system rolled over in bed and farted, and the fart smelt very much like the Opposition Party pissing away any proposed action on Global Warming in favour of scoring a few political points and maybe getting to drive around in the really big shiny cars after the next election.

And then, on the other hand, i’m hearing from people who still cling to the hope that the spectre of Global Warming will bring about a change in what we believe to be our stewardship of this planet that the only sensible thing to do is to turn to nuclear power.

I saw a statistic on Hungry Beast that the USA derives more energy from scavenged nuclear payloads from decommissioned Soviet nuclear missiles than it does from all the ‘alternative’ energy sources (wind, solar, tidal, etc) combined. That may be because they haven’t actually got any alternative energy sources, but, either way, it’s a scary statistic.

So i’m confused.

The problem with the world – from a human perspective – is that it’s run by business and politicians. Business doesn’t care about anything other than its own ability to turn a profit, and politicians don’t care about anything other than having the power to make a difference, while at the same time making as little difference as possible so as not to upset too many voters.

My confusion is this (it’s two part):

1. Is Global Warming something we can choose to heed or ignore, based on our own fleeting needs for power?
2. Who or what is going to do something about keeping the world habitable for our species?

I’ve already switched all my light globes to fluorescent, so there’s nothing more i can do…

If you have the solution to this, could you put it into action, please? I’m kind of fond of the human species, and i’d like to see them continue to do well in the future.

Where’s Doctor Who when you need him?

Yours apocalyptically,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Tess is gone, off to Indonesia with her friends.

We drove her across Melbourne, through darkness to Tullamarine, and let her out in the White Zone.

There’s no real point in the lift-givers going into the airport these days, and it costs $300 an hour to park your car.

On the way in, on the tollway, she asked why it’s called ‘Tullamarine’.

“Is it latin for something, the way ‘Nullarbor’ means ‘no trees’ in latin?”

We didn’t think so.

We tried to come up with latin meanings, but in the end it just sounded like we were casting spells, Hogwarts-style. Tullus Marinus! Tullar Marinee!

She got out of the wagon and stood there in the bright lights, middle-of-the-night bright, with her overstuffed backpack sitting by her feet like a red dog. She waved us goodbye.

So like this, only it was Tullamarine, not Toledo, the backpack was on the ground and red, not blue, and the girl was Tess, not this lass

As we pulled away, her friend (Emma?) ran up, all smiles, and hugged her. Her backpack slowly fell over. Then they did a little jumping up and down on the spot dance that – had one of them been male – would have been quite rude.

They jumped up and down so hard that Tess’s camera fell out of her hand and bounced on the concrete. It was in its little bag, so hopefully it wasn’t smashed before she’d even left Melbourne.

And then we were gone, and they were alone with the black sky above them.

Turns out, Tullamarine is named after Tullamareen, an early Melbourne aboriginal identity best remembered for escaping from gaol – the first gaol Melbourne had – by setting fire to it and burning it down.

He was captured and sent to Sydney for trial for burning down the gaol. The judge decided that since Tullamareen didn’t speak any English, and since none of the local Aborigines could understand his Werundjeri tongue, the man was simply turned out onto the street, a thousand kilometres from his home, and with no way of getting back.

He disappeared from history.

Princess and i were probably at home in bed, cuddled up naked together underneath the doona, when Tess’s plane launched into the night sky over Tullamarine.

Strange that her own parents didn’t see her off. They don’t seem to be a very close family.

I know she’s grown up and all, but if my daughter were going away to a developing nation for a month, i’d like to be at the airport to wish her well.

I hope she’s ok over there.

Yours drop-offingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

It’s December next week, so every employee in Australia is getting ready to start slowing down at work, so that they can smoothly come to a complete stop for the whole of January.

I was looking forward to spending the coming months rearranging my studio here, and working on the novel.

Yes. The Novel.

A couple of days into November i decided that i would participate in Nanowrimo after all, and quickly came up with a disposable plotline that i could hammer out some throw-away story about, at the rate of around two thousand words a day.

And then, about 7500 words in, i realised that maybe i should do that throw-away story properly, as my Starter Novel (you know, like a Starter Girlfriend?). You write a Starter Novel so that when you write your proper Novel you can say at writers’ festival panels, dismissively, “Oh, i’ve got my first ‘novel’ in a shoebox under the bed, where no-one will ever see it… it was sooooo bad….”

Cos that’s what authors say.

So Starter Novel or not, it became apparent that i couldn’t really just toss it off in the spirit of “literary abandon” that Nanowrimo demands. If it was shit, then (a) it’s always harder to rewrite an idea from scratch when you’ve written it the once, and (b) it would hurt the brand.

That’s another thing that authors say: they talk about themselves as a brand.

Anyway, so i was all looking forward to writing this wonderful Starter Novel about this boy and this girl and this whole liminality thing, along with pottering on rearranging my studio whenever i hit a writer’s block, when, eight thirty Friday morning, i gets this phone call from Mister Widget Himself, saying he wants to see me in his office at nine.

Squee!

Long story short: with the whole Global Financial Crisis eating the arse out of the market for natty little bespoke stock-management widgets and the like, now that it is finally over (the GFC, that is), we’re basically grasping any opportunity that comes the company’s way with one hand, cupping its scrotum with the other, and sucking like mad.

So i now have the golden opportunity ahead of me of working (i.e. grasping, cupping, and sucking) on a content delivery program for e-media.

I can’t say much more on account of … well, i don’t know much more than that at this stage, basically.

And i need to do it over December and January.

The client is from overseas, where they don’t have our healthy Australian lack of interest in working in those months.

So. Sucks to be me.

And grasps, and cups.

Yours suckingly,
Gullybogan

Dear Reader,

A week or so ago, Tess and some of her friends were sitting around our kitchen table, studying in their bikini tops (well, it *was* hot) when one of them (i think it was Emma) declaimed,

“Shit i’m sick of studying.”

“Yeah,” agreed our Tess, “We’ve been doing nothing but studying since… fucken kindergarten!”

The girl in the yellow bikini top (Elizabeth?) slammed down her Sharpie (the one she was doodling on the cover of her psychology textbook with) and agreed wholeheartedly that they had had well enough studying.

So they formed a holiday pact. As soon as the exams were over, they’d all go on holiday somewhere. Together.

So they could sit around on a beach somewhere, without the repressive strictures of study programs and bikini tops.

A hearty round of “Fuck yeah”s resounded about the family room, and then they started naming places they would like to go.

After a surprisingly short while, they settled.

On Indonesia.

“So that’s it, then,” Tess said, with the voice of someone who’s used to her girlfriends resolving to go to a particular café after lectures and then everyone not having the commitment to follow through on it. “We’re going to Indonesia. Straight after exams.”

That was last week.

Exams finished yesterday.

So all week Tess has been on the computer here, looking up air tickets and all that sort of thing. In the space of six days, she’s put together pretty much all the things she needs to go over to a developing country, including the vaccinations and complicated, grown-up stuff like that.

All she needs now is some clothes to wear.

“I need some shorts, i reckon,” she said last night while relaxing after her final exam, and today she went out to buy some material. I got home tonight and she had a pair of Princess’s shorts laid out on a sheet of the The Age, and she was tracing around them with Elizabeth’s Sharpie (which she seems to have left behind last week).

“You know, it’s really pretty hard to do sewing,” i offered in the way of advice.

“How hard can it be?” she protested. “If this doesn’t work out, i’ll just pin the material up against the wall, stand against it, and trace around myself. That’ll work.”

So that’s all sorted.

Now she just needs to really pin down her conversational Bahasa, and she’ll be set.

She flies out next Tuesday.

Yours sewingly,
Gullybogan

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