ooh! australia to join son of star wars? i hope they distribute light sabres to everyone… & then i hope i can trade my light sabre for a womp rat…

this would be… the same son of star wars missile defence shield that statistically has a really good chance of working (once you’ve removed all the unsuccessful tests from your data set…)

surly smurf — so i have new hair. i have new hair which, in the eastern suburbs, allegedly makes me look cool… or, at least, mildly startled… but as soon as i venture anywhere west of darlinghurst, i apparently look like a smurf… so i’ve been walking around all week, trying to hum the smurf song to myself, but i can’t remember it properly & it keeps morphing into psycho killer… maybe that’s just a sign o’ the times?

monkeys. monkeys monkeys monkeys. (now i feel better…)

ground control to major john

great moments in carpentry/the anecdotal version
relaxing beside the coogee madonna
as fridge magnets confuse the radar operators
& your faded sense of duty,
HMAS Oz Lit sending frantic signals
into the ministerial void.
we wanted the celebrity wedding of the century
& set the bar too high, too soon,
now the subsequent decades subside into reruns
of the world’s greatest military bloopers.
i’m not dick clark & you’re not either,
reading the teeth mother naked at last
to the neighbours’ kittens — they fight,
you fight, we are fighting — i voted
for president o’hara but now i’m in tulsa,
oklahoma, looking strangely bashful
in my fatigues & fatigue.
it’s so much cheaper to buy in bulk —
precision-guided, laser-targeted,
maintaining your 500 dollar-a-day atropine habit
& slouching home from the closest westfield
with half a kilo of public opinion
neatly wrapped in butcher’s paper.

mailserver outage engenders zen-like calm — e-silence descends upon the campus…

beautiful city — left for work this morning after heavy rain had passed through the eastern suburbs… full sunshine, but the roads, parks, & buildings still soaking wet… some parts of sydney are so ugly they somehow manage redemption despite themselves… riding through surry hills with wads of posters sagging from power poles & mounds of leaves piled over stormwater gratings… uh oh… i’ve gone all wordsworth…

random paper generator — wouldn’t it be fantastic if every so often your operating system spontaneously changed your preferred paper-size from A4 to Letter? mine does. microsoft: where do you think you’re going today?

system status — so the university’s mailserver has been down for about six & a half hours & the helpdesk home page still says “The system is currently performing within normal parameters, with an acceptable response time.” [update: seven & a half hours later & they’ve decided to acknowledge the whole thing is fubared…]

sun, sun, sun, sun — wooo-ooooh-oooh-ooh-ooh-ooooh…

saddle up — scored a new bike seat on sunday, (a copy of the rocket v with the whole contoured thing happening & the soft-tissue relief cutout & a nicely stitched leather cover), & yeah, it’s just so much more comfy… & as an added bonus, now the only things that creak as i ride along are my knees… (my old saddle was totally crrrkkk-urrrrk-crrrkkk… it was driving me crazy, it was driving me nuts…)

other news from the weekend…

• friday night: paul capsis @ the opera house (fantastic)
• saturday: andrew’s birthday party (great)
• saturday night: the hours (very good)
• sunday morning: cleaning, shopping (okay)
• sunday afternoon: haircut & cake baking (not too shabby)
• sunday night: dinner at catherine & francine’s (also great)

actual rain — woah. woke up this morning & it was totally, actually raining… like, the heavy, not really suitable for cycling kinda rain… so i caught the bus… & it’s been, like, raining ever since… it’s still raining now… will the rain never stop?

moodwatch — & i’m still pissed.

things are peachy (but i’m still anti) — it’s a beautiful day/what are you lookin’ at?

• robotbuilder.co.uk
• BE@RBRICK MUSEUM
• destroy-all-monsters.com

rising damp — kinda wet ride to work this morning, although sydney does this weird rain thing where it’s like, raining, but it’s not really raining… a sorta ultra-fine, almost misty kinda deal… i might hafta invest in some mudguards or something…

oh sure, now the sun’s out — of course, as i was opening the windows in my office the sun broke through the cloud cover…

suck factor is high — so it turns out i’m having a prolonged attack of the irrits… it’s kinda weird, but yeah, i’m pretty much over everything at the moment… i mean, i’m healthy, & i’m cycling, & i’m eating well, & living in coogee with keri is fantastic, & sure, work is kinda ballistic but it’s not totally overwhelming, but yeah, i’m just completely leave me alone, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me…

on the other hand — i did see laurie anderson… (but hey! was she talking to me? or was she just / practising / for one of those / performances of hers? hah!)

kittens — the other great thing about my new abode are the two kittens who live next door, disco & inferno… (hey, i live in the eastern suburbs, okay?)

if it wasn’t screwed on — hey, wait-a-minute… so i’m halfway through redfern this morning when i finally realise why i’ve been getting weird looks from the other cyclists & how come my head feels kinda different… hands up all those who left their helmets at home this morning…

it’s not like it’s a pattern — how did i get so far without realising? beats me. i mean, it’s not like i’ve got some kinda formal checklist, but really, you’d think

1. get on bike
2. put on helmet
3. start pedalling

would be pretty hard to stuff up… i guess i usually hang the helmet on the handlebars, but for some reason i must’ve put it somewhere else last night… & i guess i’ve got some form, having scored a traffic ticket several years ago when i took off on my honda after i put on my jacket & gloves but somehow overlooked the fact that i was sans-full-face arai… “hmmm,” i remember thinking to myself, “the bike sounds much noiser this morning… ooh, a police siren…”

did i mention i saw laurie anderson on sunday night?

not so buff? was it just me, or was the episode of buffy that i watched last night (the first one i’ve seen in a couple of years) really just kinda, well, totally lame?

welcome to dumpsville, population me — woke up early on saturday morning & headed down to the beach for a swim… the tide was in, & the surf was up, & i finished up on something of a beach crawl, starting out with a swim in the ocean pool at the south end, then i jumped out & had a bit of a go at bodysurfing with the kewl kids between the flags on the beach itself (hey, my shorts! & ow, my head! big waves plus no technique equals no pants & a faceful of sand), then i jumped out again & wandered up to the ocean pool at the north end of the beach for another swim, then back around the coast to gordon’s bay where i figured the water looked so fantastic i should probably go for a swim…

domestique — we did a lot of cleaning up around the flat on saturday & sorted out some cupboards & things & yeah, i feel much more integrated there now… more like that’s where i actually live, as opposed to just visiting, or being on holiday or something…

out-foxed studios — went to fox studios on saturday night planning to see the quiet american, but it was sold out, & the only other option was about schmidt… so i went to see that, & wow, it was excruciatingly bad… life is complex, & sometimes disappointing? thanks. thanks a lot… i wouldn’t be surprised if nicholson picks up an oscar for it (he acts so hard it’s distracting), but yeah, it’s an unrelentingly tepid & misanthropic little film that really has nothing much to say but takes forever to say it while labouring under the impression that it’s making a point…

no war — keri & i went to the walk against war demonstration in hyde park yesterday, & the number of people there was just astounding… we met up with keri’s friend lisa & her little daughter chloe & one of lisa’s friends… there were so many people they had to reroute the march, because the people at the front walked around the city & made it back to hyde park before the people at the back of the march could get started… the organisers came up with a figure of 500,000 people, although the channel 9 news later said numbers were “too great to accurately count” before claiming in “excess of 200,000”…

wokka wokka — as we were walking back up williams street, we discovered joanne & loma in the wok station, & after a while vivienne happened to wander past, & we all retired to roy’s famous café for coffee &/or juice…

happiness — i’m pretty sure the highlight of my life to date was seeing laurie anderson at the opera house last night… the show was basically a one hour & forty-five minute monologue, self-accompanied on keyboard/sequencer & occasionally violin with some determinedly low-tech abstract back projections, but yeah, wow, just totally so good… her voice, & her phrasing, & just her general take on things are astounding, & somehow deeply right… there’s a bit in the middle of the show when she’s talking about silence, & she fades out the music & everything just stops, & suddenly there’s complete silence for maybe fifteen seconds, & it’s just electrifying, & then she says something like, “now, if this was tv, that would be a disaster”…

ah-heh-heh-hem…

i like living in coogee,
living in coogee for me,
i like it at breakfast
i like it at tea,
a swim after work makes a happy monkey…

wet robot — the surf was too big for me last night, so i jumped into the little ocean pool at the south end of coogee beach & swam about in there for an hour or so while the sun went down… honestly, it’s just too much fun…

pollyaneurysm — fuck. first amongst the incredibly important things i don’t have time for & wasn’t planning on doing this week has been checking, & then supervising the corrections to, a rather large spreadsheet that details the university’s research performance for the previous twelve months… should be straightforward, right? i mean, in theory? except. the HR system doesn’t interface with the finance system doesn’t interface with the student system… so we’ve got three different data sets, all encoded differently, which we need to reconcile into one coherent organisational structure…

with a twist — of course, that turned out to be the easy part. there’s a whole category of income for which we only have aggregated figures, i.e. at the level of the university… unfortunately, the report has to show income disaggregated to the level of individual responsibility centres… how easy is that? with the information we have it’s actually impossible.

gummo — watched a very intense little film on video last night… not much in the way of narrative or drive, but totally evocative in a sordid, freakish way… warning: some people may find scenes of simulated violence towards animals (&/or people dressed as animals) distressing…

go young fruits drink — low calorie honey peach flavour…

wow — how good is living in coogee?

answer — good. very good.

yeeesh — how bad is star trek: attack of the clone (aka st: nemesis)?

answer — don’t get me started… [sound of howling dog] but, well, it’s bad. i mean, really bad. i set my expectation levels to sci fi film & prepared for the worst before entering the cinema &, well, it was still bad. i mean, it has a borderline sexy clone in it. but he’s no elf. & the clone has the usual superweapon (with voodoo radiation no less!) that takes longer to boot than windows 2000. in fact, it takes exactly long enough to get around to working for the forces of good (or was that mediocrity?) to prevail… when will one of these so-called supervillains invent a superweapon that actually does something as soon as they start frothing at the mouth & indiscriminately pressing the firing button, as opposed to requiring twenty minutes of special effects to warm up?

a gesture towards genre studies — or mebbe the whole ultimately impotent ultimate weapon isn’t a stupid script device so much as an entire genre commenting on the ultimate futility of putting your faith in weapons? if only the entire genre wasn’t a comment on the ultimate futility of putting any faith in the genre…

star trek: nematode — so yeah, it blows. there’s the usual nonsensical send the commanding officers on away team missions schtick… & lots of smarmy interaction between the bridge crew, who seem intent on squandering any residual “old friends” points they may have gained over the years… far & away the worst star trek film i’ve ever seen… even worse than the one when they went searching for whales… or the one where they upset ricardo montalban…

but do i care? no. because i live in coogee. where i can wander down to gordon’s bay & watch the sunset… & do laps of centennial park on my bike on my way home from work… & see the ocean from the kitchen window… & fantasise about buying a couple of pieces of new furniture… & lounge about on my new luxury sheets…

fraught — had a pretty fraught week, what with moving house & about fifteen different things all going pear-shaped at work… but i made it through okay, & yeah, raised some issues with my supervisor on friday that we’re gonna sort out on monday & i think things are gonna settle down again…

touchdown in coogee — packing all my stuff took approximately forever, but we got there in the end, thanks in no small part to assistance from keri, his royal daveness & andrew. so i’m relocated, if not yet completely settled in, & yeah, coogee is fantastic, & i’ve sussed out a great ride to & from work that takes in lots of back streets & cycle paths…

his royal daveness — dave was down here attending some meetings & giving a presentation to a conference-thingy for work, & we managed to catch up for some packing on monday night (welcome to sydney!) & then we had dinner at a little japanese restaurant in coogee on tuesday night. & this time, unlike his last visit, we managed to avoid exchanging killer flus, which was a bonus. although i did get in trouble for making an audible “bhoooorr!” noise when we stumbled across a cute puppy at the beach…

far from heaven — went & saw far from heaven with keri & her friend matt on thursday night at the randwick ritz, & yeah, totally recommended. highly stylised (a homage to douglas sirk) but at the same time completely moving & great performances & drop dead gorgeous cinematography…

i’m your vegan, i’m your fire — had dinner last night with keri’s brother stuart & his partner jess at a fantastic vegan restaurant in randwick…

so yeah, i’ve moved — & so far it’s all good… i’m still a bit perplexed about what to do with some of my stuff, but there’s time to sort it out so it’s no huge drama… & it’s so great to live near the sea… went for a swim at wylie’s baths this morning, & it was intensely cold but completely good…