The thunking of thinks

It is pleasing, when you are thinking about something, and thinking about talking about that something, to remember a quote by a very dead person who has thought exactly the way you have on that subject, and who has put that thought into words. 

But why should this be so? To have someone think your thought before you had been able to think it, merely by virtue of being older, wiser, more famous, and more dead than you ought to be annoying. It's incredibly cheeky of them, to steal that thought from you before you had even got around to even thinking about thinking about it! And to have them talk about it, too, before you even thinking about thinking about it, much less think about talking about it - it ought to make it even more irritating. 

And yet it is not the case. Does it just make us seem incredibly clever by remembering accurately what someone else has said? All things considered, shouldn't it actually make us even more particularly annoyed? If we remember what they have said, after all, that suggests that we never even thought what we thought we had thought in the first place; we had just been getting it from them all along.

That is annoying, or it ought to be annoying anyway. But I am not annoyed. 

Perhaps it is flattering to compare ourselves to these older, wiser, and more dead people; perhaps to find them so neatly expressing conceptions which we have produced by our the labouring of our own mental faculties is a compliment to the workings of our own mind. Which in itself is rather puzzling, because one does not habitually admire mouldering corpses. On the other hand, maybe they are the ones who ought to consider themselves complimented for having exercised their own cognitive organs in order to arrive at the same conclusion as us. That could be it, actually; we are pleased, in our magnanimity of mind, to grant the fruits of our cerebellum, our casual thoughts, spun off from the top of our very own heads, to those poor unfortunate older, wiser, and more dead beings that we are quoting from.

Ideally, to round this thought off, I'd be able to find a quote from an older, wiser and dead person saying what I have just said in a much pithier form, but I can't think of any off hand....

The fable of the five bricks

"Coburg," said Winston Churchill, "is a riddle wrapped in a mystery hidden in an enigma." Then again, maybe he was talking about China. Who knows? I used to live there and I'm more confused about the place than ever. Not China, I mean, Coburg. (See?)  Except, in the case of the Melbourne suburb of Coburg, it is more a market on top of a display village in place of a disused jail hiding a rubbish dump. But maybe I should explain...

We were in the sunny suburb of Coburg yesterday, the Baron and I. We happened to be looking for five bricks - although that is not why we were in Coburg. That was just a coincidence. We were really there to visit the nursery that had an open day, on the way from CERES in Northcote to the shops selling vinegar in Thomastown before stopping to get brewing supplies in Epping. Obvious, really.

Wending our way up Sydney Road, we turned to drive around the old Pentridge Jail, which by the time I first got to Melbourne had its name changed to Pentridge Piazza, but now has had a name change on its name change and is called Pentridge Village. Bland advertising posters everywhere proclaimed what a nice place it was to live in: '... so individual!... so friendly!... so close!....' Once a jail, always a jail, I guess.

Shortly we found ourselves in a labyrinth of streets, none going particularly in the direction we wanted them to, and some going in directions I have never encountered before. Dusty piles of refuse surrounded us, and we drove past stately developments that were in various states of undevelopment. It slowly occurred to us that we had no idea where we were. (The fact that it had a name, Coburg, only made our confusion all the more confusing.) In some yards, huge mounds of bricks loomed prominently, though with no building project evident. It was about this time that we remembered our need for five bricks, and we pulled in to one site (titled 'Refuse Transit Centre', or something like that). It was much like the others in every respect, with particularly enticing piles of bricks and humps of garbage tottering every which way, and a coating of soil attractively arranged on everything in order to give it an enticing sheen.

Standing in the middle of this ambiguous yard of unknown location, was a small man of uncertain nationality, indefinite purpose, improbable identity, and dubious legality. He looked as likely to know something about this place as anyone else, so the Baron boldly walked up to him. The conversation, I'm told, went more or less like this:

BARON: Hello. 

MAN: What? 

BARON: Do you work here? 

MAN: What do you want? 

BARON: Um... would we be able to collect five bricks? 

MAN: Fifty cents a brick!

At this, we decided we might as well collect our five bricks there as anywhere else. As we were loading up the car with bricks, the Man (I might as well call him Man) standing around in the yard got a call on his phone. With his habitual charm, he began shouting down the phone at whoever was on the other end. Perhaps wary of offending his visitors, he shortly walked as far away from us as possible in order to shout even louder into the phone, standing in front of a door with flaking green paint attached to a dilapidated white fibro shack.

It doesn't take long to collect five bricks, and soon the Baron and I began sorting out through our pockets for loose change. Man continued bellowing pleasantries down his mobile phone, and I had shortly fished the two dollars fifty out of my pockets. I walked up to Man to settle our accounts, and, seeing me approach, he began turning around in a half circle, until he was more facing the door than me. (He didn't even seem to hold out his hand for money.) I eventually managed to press the coins into his right hand, and we jumped back in the car and had soon found ourselves on a back street leading in to Reservoir.

So look, basically, I have no idea where we were, what the place was supposed to be doing, whether we paid the right money to the wrong man or the wrong money to the right man for the wrong thing, or anything about it at all really. But we did get our bricks.

Three complicated technical operations that I have recently performed

Loudly calling the cats in for dinner while brushing my teeth.

Eating an orange at work while typing.

Munching on cornbeard and reciting poetry at the same time.

Unfascinating fascinators

There were unfascinating fascinators, flimsy forehead floral designs, hideous head contraptions, and hat ladies everywhere on the trams and trains and buses yesterday, tottering into the windows and one another. It's all to do with a bunch of horses running around the track, or something like that.

Anyway, now that it's almost all over - please tell me it's almost all over? - I guess a lot of people will be wondering what to do with all their pieces of garish headwear. Throwing it out would seem like a waste. It would seem a tad ostentatious wearing it to work, too. Here's a few suggestions that they may find useful:

1. TAKE A CUTTING from your garish plastic fascinator or floral headdress in order to grow a beautiful garden of ugly plastic flowers! You'll have a whole array of garish plastic fascinators to use next year!

2. HANG FROM YOUR CEILING as a kind of pot pourri. It's beautiful fragrances... well, it won't have a beautiful fragrance, so just spray it with your perfume bottle or something - will spread through the whole house!

3. PLACE IT STRATEGICALLY IN THE GARDEN and smear it with honey in order to attract a swarm of bees. Soon you will have a useful and workable beehive.

4. ERECT YOUR HAT permanently in an out of the way coastal village, such as Venus Bay or Apollo Bay and use it as an attractive and brightly coloured home away from home! But be aware of squatters who may take up residence in your former headware while you are absent.

Important thought for these complicated times

The spots you see on spotty cats

Are super spotty spots.

The cats with spots are super cats,

They're cats that I like lots. 

For even though on spotty cats

I've spotted spotless spots,

I think those spots are super too - 

They're super spots to spot. 

The student essay, now with less gorm

There's something compelling to the Bad Student Essay. It seems such a potent artistic medium for expression: there are so many ways you can make an argument go wrong. I'm tempted to go back to university now just so I can spend my time writing bad essays on brilliant writers. I mean, when I was a uni student I was just mediocre at it; now, I feel I can really bring to life the full force of Badness in my essays. I've been practising, here, have a look...

In Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge metaphorically illustrates the dangers of sailing.

Blake, in his poem The Sick Rose, eloquently speaks of the pleasures and troubles of gardening.

There is also a slight possibility that, in his poem Jim Hillaire Belloc is implicitly hinting at the dangers of being eaten by lions.

Ozymandias is a poem about a statue.

In the The Lady of Shallot Tennyson uses the full force of his poetic imagination to describe to us a tower.

It is impossible to say for sure what Burns' profoundly ambiguous poem To a Mouse is about.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is clearly a book about racism. 

 Who can truly say what Edward Gibbon's book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire really deals with?

Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock is a stirring condemnation of the hairdressing fashions of his day.

However, a sexual interpretation of Andrew Marvell's poem To His Coy Mistress is just possible. 

Reporter speaks in front of superimposed image

The Sky News Network has spared no expense this US Federal Election, it has been revealed, sending its reporter David Speers on a journey to speak in front of superimposed images of a number of well-known US locations.

Hitting the campaign trail with US Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Speers has spoken in front of superimposed images of the Washington Monument, before heading to speak in front of a superimposed image of the Statue of Liberty, after which he went to speak in front of a number of other equally recognisable superimposed images, including a superimposed image of the Golden Gate Bridge and a superimposed image of naked men doing rude things on Castro Street, San Francisco.

Speers has been tireless in his trek from superimposed image to superimposed image, at several points speaking in front of a superimposed image of the entire US while a computer-generated animation of a plane flew around it drawing lines on top of the superimposed image. He has gone to every attempt to speak to superimposed images of the candidates, or at the very least let them speak to themselves.

And it's not over yet for Speers, who on election night will speak in front of one of the great natural sites of America, a superimposed image of a board with names and computer-generated numbers on it.

When it's all over, Speers will hop into the superimposed image of a plane (in the Sky studio) and fly back to a superimposed image of Australia (also in the Sky studio), where he will sleep in a superimposed image of his bed (that one's in the Sky studio too) for the first time in weeks while the superimposed (see above) image of a news bar will run over the top of him telling all the other superimposing stories of the day.

It will certainly be an inspiring journey for Speers, from one corner of the Sky studio to another, on this incredibly important event in US politics.

Superimposed image of a country that allegedly exists in Sky studios somewhere.

The procession of the proceedings in the due course of the due course

Upon the dawning of this glorious day, I rose joyously from bed with hope in my heart and a clear plan in my mind as to the proceedings that would proceed thereon. Briskly, I donned my best turquoise tracky-dacks, and swiftly I pulled on my luxuriant grey cardigan, before proceeding out into the domicile to proceed with my, er, proceedings.

To the Comfortable Couch I marched, and shrewdly set up shop there. A small porridge, two cups of coffee, and a short perusal of the internet later, and I was entirely ready for my plan to take effect. All that was lacking for my preparatory stratagems to come to fruition was this: a cat.

We of course have two specimens of this, well, species habituating our, um, habituation, but right at the present time (that present time being about an hour past) the felines were busily manifesting themselves in the garden, chasing after dear little mice, and hunting down various endangered avian species, and engaging themselves in various other adorable activities, and could not immediately be won over.

It is futile to procure a cat when the said cat does not supervise the procuring of itself, by itself. Although it may be possible to grasp said feline and carry it inside, it will soon find a way of swirling itself out of one's arms and will look at you with suspicion for many hours following. Trickery may from time to time be employed (calling them in for a treat), but again the end result will not be compliance or gratitude but suspicion.

Therefore, the only thing to do was to lay hold of the virtues of patience and fortitude, and to wait. I therefore determined to sit where I was - a very easy task as where I was was a couch - and do just that, until such time as a cat procured themselves.

And I sat; and I sat; and I sat some more.

I would have become entirely overwhelmed with boredom but for, on the other hand, internet, and comfortable couch.

Fortune, as they say, favours the bold, or perhaps in this case it favours the lazy, for, in due course, a cat did indeed procure themselves, and just the right sort of cat too*, and in due course of that due course, that cat elevated herself to a comfortable position upon my lap, richly covered in turquoise tracky-dacks, and proceeded to curl up, and shed all manner of hairs over my computer. 

And that, as they say, is that.

*ie one of ours.

Blowvember

The Eskimos, I am told (I don't know who told me but they did) have hundreds of words for snow. They do so because, being surrounded by the stuff, they need something to liven their conversation and pepper their evenings at home with amusing and elegant turns of phrase. Snow is very attractive in its own way - white and shining and cold - but would hardly afford a wide variety of conversational material if it were just called one thing.

On the other hand, I have also heard that a certain member of the Darwin family - the one that produced Charles Darwin, the chap with the beard who wrote about evolution and went about irritating aphids with strands of hair and perving on vines as they were trying to grow up the wall - wrote an entire thesis on the distinction between pus and mucus, and won a university medal on that same thesis. A fine subject, but the mind boggles as to how it could be treated at the vast length that thesis requires. Is there an entire lexicon of bodily effluvia, emulsions, excrescences and eructation that I am unaware of, similar to the expansive Eskimo lexicon for dealing with snow?

It is at such times as this current season that one can only wish for a similar lexicon for a very specific problem of one's own. For, one finds, a positive plethora of sniffs and snuffs and snuffles and sniffles and snorts and harrumphs besets one in the days and nights. As one lays one's head down on the pillow the proliferation of snorts and hoots and snores is a wonder... well, not so much a wonder to hear. But it is certainly a thing. As one wanders about during the day, the wheezing and sneezing and hacking and spluttering is just as much, if not more, so. Indeed, between one moment of ahem and another of phlegm, what one finds oneself wishing for is not so much a smattering of words to pepper and salt one's vocabulary according to taste - nor a short dictionary to list the according words, or a thesis to sort out all their fine distinctions from one another - no. What is required, above all else, is a an artistic movement, of paintings and books and dramas and song to convey the full-bodied experience:

Now is the month of spraying
Of coughing hacking braying
Bleagh bleagh bleagh bleagh bleagh bleagh bleagh bleagh bleagh etc
And with a snort-sneeze-spurt
A booger on your shirt -
Bleagh bleagh bleagh etc. 

(Music here.)

Perhaps it is merely an idle whimsy of mine, but on the other hand I am certain that if this innovation I propose were to be implemented, the whole of society would change for the better, and in a short space of time a state of utopia would dawn upon the earth and we would need never work again. Although I suppose it might be good to have someone make handkerchiefs from time to time.