Second day cold cuts
Posted by cacophony in : My life , 3 commentsIs anyone else out there suffering post-fun disorder? I grieve for the end of my holidays.
Park yourself here
Posted by cacophony in : Entertainment , 3 commentsCreate yourself as a South Park character here: http://www.sp-studio.de/
Pretty good likeness, no?
A green room for all of us
Posted by cacophony in : Entertainment , 6 comments
Take 40 young actors, ten playwrights, some wine, Minties and assorted props. Put them in an urban pub, build them a stage and tell them to do their worst. It sounds like a recipe for disaster but it’s actually a fun and productive night out.
Dante’s, Gertrude St, Fitzroy, holds play readings on the third Monday of each month where they open the floor to new and innovative works by local writers, presented (with scripts) by actors with as little as an hour to get to know their parts. It gives the playwrights a chance to see their work being staged and the actors can help them develop it.
Everyone pays $10 at the door, which goes into a pool to be distributed to the writers with the most popular plays.
This week, I saw plays about brotherhood, good and evil, madness, perverts and phone sex. It was a great night out and a panacea to the cultural cringe of the silly season.
Well worth hopping on the 58 tram.
Dredging the cache for lost love
Posted by cacophony in : My life , 6 commentsSometimes, when bored and online, I feel the urge to look up past lovers on the sly and find out what I can about their lives. I’m not sure what compels me to do this, maybe I’m a fundamentally miserable sod. Maybe I’m just bored.
It’s on these google-fueled expeditions into cyberspace that I have discovered a few things:
1. Everyone has a blog and most of them are about nothing of consequence.
2. People you thought you knew can change dramatically - physically, geographically, theosophically - and it can be a bit hard to reconcile their rantings with the person you knew.
3. You find out things you might not want to know.
4. Your actions might be a bit pervy.
Still, it’s an interesting journey. Tonight, I’ve learnt the bloke I callously said “have a nice life” to on the steps of Flinders Street Station now has a child. And my first love got married, divorced and moved to Tokyo, where he translates books and music (and writes a successful blog about Japanese culture). I also managed to track down a few mates I’d lost touch with, who I’ll now contact.
Here is a cool blog about the same subject: http://notfrisco2.com/leones/?p=2252
So it’s not all bad; though you ought to be prepared for a shock. And it’s worth considering when writing your own blog that someone, somewhere, is probably looking you up…
Mixing business and pleasure
Posted by cacophony in : My life , 5 commentsI received a call out of the blue recently - at work - from a nice young lad I had fancied for a few months. He called to ask me out, I think, but also wanted me to help him out in a professional capacity. I organised to help him professionally and we made a vague date for dinner “sometime”.
So now I’m confused: does he really want to go out with me or does he just want my help? Or did he just use my job as a way to get to me personally?
Do you think it’s bad form to mix business with pleasure in this way? Or is it just a way to kill (or capture) two birds with one stone in our time-poor modern lives?
Home is where the art is
Posted by cacophony in : Where I Live , 4 comments
Walking by the Yarra tonight, as I do most nights, I saw a wedge of swans cruising up our famed brown river and I got to thinking of how beautiful Melbourne is at night. The sun was setting behind Nadim Karam’s beautiful Travellers sculptures on the Sandridge Bridge and the lights of the city were reflected in the clear water. A Japanese guitarist’s flamenco rhythms echoed up at me from underneath the Arts Centre. A teenager on the Princes Bridge smiled as I ambled past. “This is nice,” I said to myself. “Have I found my home?”
I’ve been here two years and I have some good friends but, like Chaplin, I consider myself a “citizen of the world”. We moved around a lot when I was a kid so I don’t have a home town or a house full of memories. I came to Melbourne on a whim because it seemed like a cool place to be; which it is but does that make it home?
What makes a place home? Is it a house? Family? A good local pub? Is it the special places you go to escape? Can home be a person?
And why is it so important to us?
Who operates your teleprompter?
Posted by cacophony in : Entertainment , 6 commentsHere’s a question to divide the nation: who is the sexiest newsreader on television?
Is it Sandra Sully from late night Channel 10 news?
Or Kerry O’Brien from the 7.30 report?
Lee Lin Chin from SBS World News?
Or Peter Thompson from Talking Heads?
Well then, who is it?
Another cup of…?
Posted by cacophony in : Eat & Drink , 5 commentsIn the absence of Dr Karl, does anyone know why a cup of tea tastes so much better made in a pre-warmed cup?
Boxing clever
Posted by cacophony in : My life , add a comment
When my local paper printed a volunteer call for a charity gift wrap counter at a department store, I put my hand up. I’ve wrapped scores of presents in my time and mine are usually the most-admired under the family tree. “Why not?”, I said. “How hard can it be?”
I scurried in a little late, having missed the training session. One volunteer who was clocking off offered to talk me through the process. First, there were guidelines on how to wrap (set our in a 20-point instruction manual I was later to find, with coloured graphics and pointed arrows for direction). There was corporate behaviour guidelines, a dress code and conflict resolution strategies. These were presumably for use when people wanted to argue their gift was medium ($3 suggested donation) rather than large ($5). Bureaucratic? Certainly. But I figured I could still do some good.
My first customer had a DVD: small, square, flat. Simple, right? Well, no. The stiff white paper crinkled across the top and the shiny lacquered surface repelled my attempts to fasten it with sticky tape, which I had to use reams of. My olive ribbon bow was small and off to one side, like a mangy piece of seaweed caught on some shiny square of refuse washed up on the beach. The lady looked at me with skepticism. “Is this new?” She pointed to the stand but I knew she meant my gift-wrapping career. Present wrapped, though, she handed me her donation and placed the albino driftwood in her bag.
Customer number two had a large boxed blender to wrap for a wedding. The 20-something couple seemed impressed with the paper wrapping. So far, so good. I fastened the ribbon with a knot recalled from Girl Guides and draped it down the front with a flourish. “Hmmm,” the woman said. “-I- get the art of it but could you do something a little more conservative; like a bow?” So another mangy bow was sent out into the world.
After four hours at the gift-wrapping bar, I wrapped eight mangled gifts and raised maybe $30 for charity. I cringe when I imagine my crinkled offerings sitting under Christmas trees around Melbourne but it’s what is inside that counts, right?
A little change will do you good
Posted by cacophony in : Local services , 4 comments
Language experts and pedants have long lamented spellcheckers for destroying our ability to spell. They may be right but I think schools and the individual should take some of the blame.
But the naysayers seem to have ignored a more insidious education failure: our inability to count.
I bought lunch today in a cafeteria and the total was $7.65. The girl behind the counter, who seemed smart enough, took my $20 note and rang it up on the cash register. Then I discovered some change in my bag and handed her a $2 coin and 70c in coins. She stared at them like she expected them to grow wings and fly away. Twice, she went to put them in the cash drawer and stopped herself, second-guessing her arithmetic. Eventually, I had to tell her to give me $15 and 5c change.
Maths was never my strong suit in school or since and percentages still floor me but I have enough faith in my subtraction skills to feel confident with most transactions. I wonder if in an age when schools have moved away from rote learning and focus instead on how things work, whether we’re losing skills like counting backwards from 10.
In the age of computer calculators and cash registers, have we forgotten how to count?
