My super-reliable guide to everything about everything

I am toying with the idea of writing a Guide to Everything about Everything. It will be like those booklets that you get with your brand new computer, your brand new phone, your brand new coffee machine, and your brand new everything else, except that you will be able to understand it. It might even work. None of that 'insert item N into socket F3' crap; it will be full of practical tips such as the following:

TELEVISION NOT WORKING
1. Go up to television.
2. Thump it.
3. If television does not work, thump it again, harder.
4. Repeat until television works.

This particular method, perfected over many years of practical experience in the televisual watching trade, has served me well many a time. It will be fully fleshed out with details:

TELEVISION GETTING BAD SIGNAL
1. If your television is getting a bad signal maybe it is because someone is standing in the room interrupting the flow of the television signal. It's like feng shui, or something like that. Anyway, get them to stand in a different part of the room and the television reception should clear up nicely. If necessary, get the person to remain in that position for as long as your show is on.

Essentially, my position is that the professional booklets distributed to aid users of these products needlessly complicate matters. If your phone isn't working, why worry about connections and circuitry and chargers and stuff like that when really, all you need to do to make the phone work is shout at it? That's all right, that question was rhetorical ,which means you don't have to answer that. And so what if a particular key on the keyboard of your computer isn't working? You just have to press it harder. And harder. And harder. And even harder, until it keeps working, or until your computer explodes, and don't worry, that hardly ever happens.

Other methods include:
- Firmly staring at something until it feels so ashamed of itself that it does the right thing.
- Jiggling something about/throwing it at the wall/chucking it up and down to make it work.
- Throwing objects at it. 

If, after all these comprehensive and focused efforts, your television still doesn't work, I have an alternative to my alternative: take the screen out of the television, gut the circuitry out of it, put a pot plant in there with some string hanging off it, put the cat in there too - and I guarantee you, you won't even want to change channels all night. 

Kulcha Korner

Alan Ginsberg's long poem Howl, shocked and thrilled audiences when it was first published. However, his follow up poem to Howl is less well known. In spite of the fact it is only three lines long and was in fact just a dinner party invitation:

SIMPER 

We would love for you to come. 

It's been so long since we have seen you,

And we are so looking forward to it.    

Also little remembered today are Ginsberg's Grumble, Hoot, Snore, and Triple Snuffle.

Home handy tips from Tim

Today, I learned that, if you can't screw the door for the hen coop to the table, why not nail it instead? You can get them to go in quite a long way with only a few hammer blows, and if they're bigger than the screws you're using, then you really have no excuse. 

Next, I will attempt to tile the television screen, and stick the fridge to the ceiling with Blu Tac. Home DIY is fun! 

Factious

FORMER Labor leader Kevin Rudd says the party is 'sick' and urgently needs reform. 

 Mr Rudd, now a backbencher, was responding to a call from ALP stalwart John Faulkner calling for greater accountability and a lesser role for factions. 

''There's something sick which needs to be healed,'' Mr Rudd said during a radio interview today. 

Power should be taken away from the ''effectively unelected factional faceless men'' and given to rank-and-file members, Mr Rudd said. - Kevin Rudd says the Labor Party is 'sick', The Daily Telegraph

 Fighting has broken out in the Labor Party today between the Faction Calling For An End to Factions and the Faction Calling for an end to the Faction Calling for an End to Factions.

Meanwhile, the Faction Not Sure on Whether There Should be an End to Factions has called for an end to factional infighting amongst the factions about whether to have factions.

However, it is gradually becoming less and less clear, with the fight between the Faction Calling for An End to Factions, the Faction Calling for an End to the Faction Calling for an End to Factions, the Faction Calling for an end to Fighting Between the Factions, the Fight over Factions Fighting, the Faction Calling for more Fighting Between the Factions, and the Fight over the Faction Calling less Fighting Between the Factions, just who will end up winning, or just what it's all about really.

In the end, one thing is clear: factions are good, and we all need more factions, and factions fighting between factions, and fighting between factions fighting with other factions, and factions fighting factions fighting factions fighting factions. Except for the Faction Calling for an End to Factions. They're just crazy.

Paragraph in a job application

Have demonstrable skills in sitting in an ergonomically-appropriate manner while cat sits in lap for extended periods of time, and performing advanced tai chi manouevres in order to ensure both cat and self remain comfortable while self keeps drafting job applications on the computer. Also, experience in multiskilling.

Crimbo Australiana

Crimbo... a slang word for Christmas.... A secular version of Christmas, esp. the commercial aspects of the holiday.

Hey Crimbo!

Crimbo Australiana!

Hey Crimbo!

Krimbo Australiana!

Reindeer horns on a Torana

Crim-bo

Au-stra-lia-na!

Doors cribbed out in plastic holly

Sweaty Santas faking jolly

Tinsel Hills Hoist Woolies rejoice…

Crim-bo

Au-stra-lia-na!

Hey Crimbo!

Crimbo Australiana!

Hey Crimbo!

Crimbo Australiana!

Too much pav and no banana

Crim-bo

Au-stra-lia-na!

Muzak carols at the neighbours

Verandah decked out like a gay bar

Next one only half a year away

Crim-bo

Au-stra-lia-na!

Hey Crimbo!

Crimbo Australiana!

Hey Crimbo!

Crimbo Australiana!

This mince pie has no sultana

Crim-bo

Au-stra-lia-na!

The moon must die

"A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." Mark Twain said that, which is funny, because he also said "Dissent is the highest form of purple monkey dishwasher." So I'm not sure if we can trust Twain. On the other hand, as Abraham Lincoln once said, "what a big load of flapdoodle poppycock balderdash."

Speaking of which, did you all hear about the US plan to blow up the moon? It appeared in the Fairfax papers, so it must be a big load of flapdoodle poppycock balderdash true!

US planned to blow up the moon

In fact the first reference to this story I read was days ago, in that reputable organ of journalistic veracity, The Daily Mail. These quibbles aside, the story is truly fascinating:

The secret project, dubbed 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' or 'Project A119', was allegedly devised by US military chiefs at the height of the space race in the late 1950s as a show of strength over the Soviet Union, scientists claim.

So, not entirely clear here how this is a plan and not just an idle idea thrown up by a couple of people of unknown influence in the US military. Let's tinker with that headline:

US 'planned' to blow up the moon

It's not entirely clear from the headline either that it's the US military, so maybe we should put some big fat quote marks around 'US', too. Hmmm...

'US' 'planned' to blow up the moon

Also:

The United States planned to carry out an explosion on the moon with a nuclear bomb during the cold war, according to reports.

It seems here they didn't plan to do anything so megalomaniac as explode the entire lunar body, just raise a bit of dust on one side of said lunar body with a bomb. So:

'US' 'planned' to 'blow up' the moon

Can't fault the involvement of the moon in all this, though. The research in The Age and The Daily Mail regarding the definitive presence of the moon in this story is of undoubted merit. However, the story now seems to be something like the following: a group within the US, though not the US themselves planned, in a way that doesn't seem to have involved much more than thought a bit about the possibility, to explode, in a non-destructive manner, a body of dust on a particular part of the moon.

I'm not sure if that would fit very well in the headline space though...

An oestrogen and run incident

At the Gay Little Cafe this morning there were not one, not two, but three mummies. What's the group noun in these situations? A collectivity of nurturers? A lactating mob?

I was, as you can imagine, intimidated. Usual signs: heart racing, scared, concerned, finding it hard to breathe, feeling as if I was just about to be run over in the street by oestrogen.

Or maybe that was just the coffee?

Questions for year 12 students

Detergent: the toothpaste of the sink, or toothpaste: the detergent of the mouth. Which is it?

A productive day at work

Help! Help! There's tomato juice leaking out of my arm!

Accidents in the kitchen involving a can opener, a lid that won't come off properly, a full can of tomatoes, and a pale t-shirt are the best sort to have.

For best effects there ought to be someone sitting nearby ready to be suitably shocked by the unfolding catastrophe. This can be hard to arrange, but believe me, it's worthwhile.

The appreciative drunkard

Positive heckling: the art of interrupting people on stage in a rude and supportive manner...

*** 

You SUCK... a great deal less than my unjust interruption might lead you to have expected.

Get off the stage... and into a recording studio quickly, so everyone can hear your divine voice!

I rate your show a big fat O.... as in OH MY GOODNESS THIS IS WONDERFUL!

DisGUSted - discussed it with all my friends and we all agree this is great!

SHUT UP... that fenestral aperture, because the street noise is interfering with my appreciation of their lovely lyrics!

***

Idea in part adapted from this. Suggest a few more in comments and I might throw them in the next copy of Badger's Dozen.

Short poem

About patting the cat

Hurricanes and hurricanes of hair

Hair on lap and hair on chair

Hair in food and hair to spare

Hair here and there and everywhere 

Sometimes even hair on hair

Hurricanes and hurricanes of hair.