toby jugs

are vile vile vile.

sylvia plath waited for her black rook

i'm waiting for the kookaburra of invention to laugh outside my window.

have now gone 20 years burger free

excepting one junior burger incident in 1998. feels good.

the "times" asks à propos g20 meeting

wot about rotherham? well, it's obvious. rotherham's finished. let them eat twizzlers.

one of life's simple joys

is to leave a ringing 'phone unanswered.

how depressing

80% of coffee sold in oz is instant. crumbs. that's not coffee, that's toilet duck.

a fellow in the "observer"

says it's time to bury cool britainia. a simple burial won't do it. exorcism required.

nevermind

arms reductions talks. it's time for an international treating banning teen movies.

moved to twitter

username is "ourzippy".

morning rush hour, lower thames street

looks like a bank holiday crowd coming back from brighton.

the pink revolution

malibu stacey impersonator, paris hilton, has buzzed into town with the intention of lifting australia’s spirits by trying on dresses in our high street boutiques. lucky us. the media is doing its bit too, obsequiously following her every move. it’s nice to see deference isn’t dead.

looking back, it seems 20th century philosophy was mostly concerned with the problem of meaning in a disenchanted (i.e. godless) world. to sartre and his gauloises-stained chums the answer was ‘commitment’; usually commitment to an obnoxious political ideology of some kind. any kind. it didn’t matter which. so long as it promised to smash liberal democracy.* above all, it was freedom they despised.

this is where paris hilton’s “pink revolution” comes in. her response to the crisis of life’s meaninglessness is to pull out her bloomingdale’s card and cry “charge it!”. hence melbourne and sydney are just two more stops on her mission to spread the redemptive message of “self-realization through shopping”. she's a postmodern aimee semple mcpherson. sal-vay-shun!

the new year’s looking up already.

*remnants of it still survive today. witness those forlorn little gatherings in berlin and london cheering on hamas against israel, or else bemoaning the introduction of democracy in iraq.

everyone hails it as progress

celebrating the blair/brown era of "classless britain" is this new calendar of "british style".

that'll do nicely.

most amusing christmas gift received so far

one small, 8 months past use-by-date, block of german milk chocolate (with gross raisin filling), with original price tag ($3) attached. wasn't intended as a 'joke' gift either. pure hilarity nonetheless.

top that, napa valley.

bold or brazen?

it could be the most daring programming decision of all time. one of the commercial tv networks has lifted the kooky soap "the bold and the beautiful" from its regular bored-housewife, mid-afternoon slot and parked it in prime time, monday through friday. one naturally fears for the job security of the person who made that decision.

that's a lot of soap suds for melbourne audiences to chew through.

there was an awful moment the other night when the fellow playing the forrester patriach was almost called upon to act (that's him in the obligatory coma). it was a scary moment. would he or wouldn't he? thankfully, at the last minute minute he reverted to type and resisted the impulse. still, it was an unsettling experience. he was seconds away from actually acting. then who knows what might have happened?

brand new baritone

the only advantage of getting a bug (in december, for crissakes) is that i can talk like barry white if i want to. oh, yeah.

cracking film, gromit

typically film and tv 'product' arrives in oz long after it has screened in the northern hemisphere. no one seems to know why. but owing to a rupture in space-time continuum, or a disturbance in the force, or some such, the latest wallace & gromit featurette "a matter of loaf and death" has premiered here in advance of its english broadcast. and it's swell. the sets are superb. it also features a terrific villainess, piella bakewell, who is built on the sturdy lines of 1950s english womanhood. the hairstyle looks to have been lifted from the prim proprietor of the railway teashop in "brief encounter". and just look at that tremendous pair of cankles! grand, eh lad?

bring back mr stokes

terrestrial tv is a wasteland at the moment. actually, it's been that way for some time. ever since the viewer was caught in a gruesome 'reality' pincers move between "survivor" and "big brother". programming hasn't been the same since. i'm inclined to give up on the medium altogether, except for these last 3 vestiges of entertainment:

"the simpsons" (more new episodes please)

"foyles war" (an tea-soaked elegy to bygone english stiff-upper-lipedness and emotional restraint)

"the great houses of britain" (a swell architectural history of england up until pevsner, le corbusier and mies van der rohe cast their evil, darth vaderish influence over the cities).

lovely manchester

the native genius of the english people

a small item appeared in the "times" today (here) describing the horrified impressions of luisa de carvajal on arriving in london in 1605, one year after the composition of the seedy "measure for measure". naturally she was appalled by what she saw—especially the noise, filth, and bad food. but the fun really starts with the "have your say" comments. instead of taking offense "times" readers generally responded in a characteristically english fashion:

"it's dirty and lawless. the food's terrible. glad to see that nothing's changed." (jessica, london)

"yes, yes, but what was london like in 1605?" (slade wallis, retford)

i remember a slow moment during the guardian's over-by-over commentary of the 2003 world cup when the description of play was momentarily abandoned for a discussion of the ugliest conurbation in england. there were dozens of nominations. i think it was reading wot won it. but, crucially, only the english would take pleasure in this kind of amused self-mortification. it's a handy attitude to have. especially if you live in hull.

quite by accident, you understand

i stumbled across "usedmagazines.com", where someone is trying to offload old copies of "leg action" magazine. (best of luck with that.) i expect our vendor is an o.a.p. from somewhere in the north-east of england, dressed in a mackintosh and flat cap, who picks up his regular copy of the "daily mail" with "leg action" tucked discreetly inside—thereby keeping the universe in harmony, balancing the forces of rectitude and smut.

making spells

as we know the proper place to learn the language is on the fridge door, pushing magnetic letters around, just like the infant shakespeare did. it's also where the nephew, zoom, currently two-and-a-half, will soon be deploying letters to form important sentence structures like "nanna smells" and "cabbage is gross".

to kick things off i cleaned out the local "toys r us" of their magnetised alphabets and introduced zoom to these three, high-scrabble-scoring, word concepts. "haruspicy": the divination of future events through the examination of animal entrails. "quadroon": persons of one quarter negro blood. and "dropsy": a disease often mentioned in eighteenth century literature, though sadly now called œdema (where's the fun in that?)

unfortunately the manufacturers are stingy with the vowels so "homunculus" will have to wait. otherwise, avuncular responsibilities discharged.

overheard outside a commercial depilatorium

mother to daughter: "you wait here while mummy gets her minge done".

rather enjoyed

those extracts from dirk bogarde's published letters which were lodged in the "sunday telegraph". here he is, doing the rounds, promoting one of his books:

"did the 'tour'… birmingham, oxford, all the university towns. fun and moving. harrods, on the other hand, was as funny as a baby's funeral… millions of ugly people and a rude woman who said, in a very loud voice, 'my god! look what he's come to. selling himself in public!'"

that voice, that censorious voice, is the real, true voice of england. recognise it anywhere.

also amusing are some of the other reproving comments lobbed his way while out in public:

"left france, have you?"
"thinner than i imagined"
"pity, but after 50, you know"

and the most splendid of the lot: "he's buying tinned tomatoes". which magically combines disapprobation, noseyness, class distinction, and the mundane. brilliant, brilliant stuff.

some terribly brilliant advice given by a career woman in an english broadsheet

"my advice to career women is to get into the habit of rubbing really expensive body cream in after a bath."

and that, i expect, will solve everything.

economic indicators

nevermind the consumer price index, inflation, cash rate, new jobs advertised, or the price-per-barrel of crude oil. it's time for a new econometric measure. an instant guide to economic boom or bust is the s.p.i.: spam frequency index. the current influx of lottery-themed unsolicited emails floating around is a sure sign of economic gloominess ahead.

fool's gold

what a wheeze. best selling authoress, katie price, has casually disclosed she doesn't actually bother to write her hugely popular entertainments. instead she farms the actual writing aspect out to a thankless factotum or amanuensis. quite enterprising, that. price "merely thinks up the plot - leaving the complex task of conjuring up the golden prose to an assistant," is how one "daily mail" journalist tremulously put it. gold indeed. i wonder if any of her hundreds of thousands of readers feels a little swindled?

goodbye to "east angular" and all that

after 8 cruel, neuron-busting years it looks like those zeros at channel 10 are finally pulling the plug on "big brother". i think hosanahs are in order. though i can't forget the collateral damage. in particular, how "bb" shattered the illusion that people are basically decent and moderately intelligent. on the evidence of those in "bb" captivity they're not. not by a long way. its only contribution to the culture is adding the phrase "turkey slap" to the lexicon. not much to show for 8 years work, is it? anyway, now that the queen bee of reality tv is gone, maybe all the others will likewise disappear. roll on that happy day.

bloomin' marvelous

a tremendous pair of queen victoria's knickers, with a truly majestic circumference of 50 inches, are being flogged by the english auction house, hanson's. this garment belongs in the british museum. it's an ornament to the nation. and in churchill's words "makes you proud to be british".

england is in a dreadful way these days. the titanic proportions of these bloomers (made for a woman not quite 5 feet tall) will put a smile back on english faces. and restore some much needed national pride.

so much for price parity

one of the unexplained quirks of oz is the jumbo price differential for consumer goodies relative to the rest of the civilised world. what something costs in america usually costs two or three times as much here (irrespective of exchange rates). no one seems to know why this should appertain. so when telephone companies promised "comparable" pricing for the apple iphone 3g, i didn't hold my breath. this gizmo is $200 in america and, presto-changeo, $700 here. it must be magic. or a suitable matter for a parliamentary inquiry, i think. still, it's good to see the epidemic of apple iphone fever. no one, i notice, is queuing at 6:30 in the morning for a beige "windows" phone.

snacktacular

over the other side of melbourne, at queenscliff, the latest tourist phenom involves hand-feeding the giant stingrays (2 metres across) which glide into the shallows under the pier. what fun.

going caravaning

taste buds are in mutinous revolt against the host organism. i've gone off coffee. all espressoed out. desperate measures required. reverting to tea in the interim. russian caravan tea, to be precise.

a boost

as a consequence of the sclerotic world economy 600+ starbucks outlets in america are closing. hooray. hopefully the dozen or so in oz will be next.

mcfood

in an ill-considered attempt to defibrillate flagging sales, mcdonalds in oz has released a "mcafrica" burger. hmm. now africa has certain things in abundance: corruption, famine, war, disease, poverty, ignorance and aids. but food? not so much. now if it were a true mcafrica burger, reflecting the diet of the continent, it would be comprised mostly of africans.

brilliant

this lovely poster has been designed by the local authorities in england to publicise the necessary work they do. like spew removal. nothing like puffing up one's image, i suppose. perhaps this isn't quite the endorsement they were looking for? though re-addressed, as it were, this poster would do excellent service as a "welcome to liverpool" emblem.

though not intended as a piece of social commentary, this image is a nice summation of contemporary britain: a place awash with illegal immigrants, terrorists, binging, crime, yobs, and a general unseemliness not seen since hogarth's day.

the councilors have unwittingly caught the "very pith and marrow" (to steal from hamlet's phrasebook) of "cool britannia". it's been an astonishing cultural reversal.

the sweet science

it's a wonder of modern confectionery. or chemistry. i'm talking about sour gummi worms, or "squirms" as they're called here. how can something that is almost wholly comprised of sugar still taste sour? it's a miracle. a suspension of the normal laws of nature. and is more amazing in its own way than the feeding of the 5,000.

a star is gone

unless it's "singin' in the rain", it takes an extraordinary talent to make a musical watchable. cyd charisse is one of these. what would "the band wagon" be without her? or "silk stockings"? hollywood just lost a true star. a pity.

hail to the chef

gordon ramsay recently touched down in oz. naturally there were teenage girls on hand to meet him, swoon, scream and forward their phone numbers. he has cursed his way into their hearts.

it's the fizzy drink what done it

news dominated yesterday by the revelation that australians are per capita the world's fattest. huzzah! take that tonga!

a star is born

this year's olympics at peking promises jumbo servings of pollution, ruling party bombast, pre-fabricated hyperbole, the usual glut of non-sports (eventing, for crissakes!), and the revelation of track running's next superstar: allyson felix. felix's running gait is arguably the most aesthetically beautiful movement in contemporary sport. it's astonishing that someone so lightly built can dominate a power event like the 200 metres. she's going to light up that bloated, five-ringed circus.

a productive evening

finally tracked down the uncredited schumann lieder "der nussbaum" used, famously, over the top of the crowd scenes at wolverhampton in "hulmerist" (though can't decide between the elly ameling, karita mattila, and elisabeth schwarzkopf versions). also learned how nerd rod runtledge acquired atomic powers to become radioactive man's aide-de-camp, fallout boy.

the good sydney

the press has been paying a rather stingy tribute to sydney pollack this week, only getting up off their seats to cheer "tootsie". that's fun but i prefer pollack's wonderful performance in woody allen's "husbands and wives" and his role as an interviewee on alain klarer's "american cinema: 100 years of film-making". usually when people mention sydney they mean the bad sydney (that place just north of here). sydney pollack is the good sydney.

he's english, of course

after reading about some imbecile who claims to have eaten nothing but mars bars for the last 17 years—12 a day apparently—i only hope that when he's finally carried into st. bart's he's refused all medical help (article here).

dr evil

wins the annual "robert brasillach lifetime achievement award" for putting an intellectually respectable face on totalitarianism (and general academic p.r. work for other everyday forms of despotism); and being the darling of know-nothing undergraduates everywhere.

hands off, nature boy

some people say puffins are nasty. not me. i like 'em. they have a wonderful air of aloof self-possession. and unlike the contestants on reality-tv shows, they're very protective of their own dignity. in this case being impudently hoisted and inspected by a prying parkie on faroe island. gotcha!

shelf life

it must be brooding season. a female columnist in "the sunday times"—putting a spring in every woman's step, i'm sure—urges women everywhere to "settle" for whatever they can get husband-wise (see article here). a proper cheerupper.

relationship frogger

one of the more curious dating phenoms are those people who, though clearly dissatisfied with their other halves, won't abandon ship until someone better comes along. and so they stick it out, joylessly, all the while scanning the horizon for something propitious. it's rather like the frog in frogger who won't cross the river unless there's another log or bunch of turtles to jump on. makes no sense to me. frogs can swim after all.

peppermint patty needs help

just when it seemed the "man booker prize" shortlist had put us off literature permanently…

one of better recent publishing enterprises has been the release of the "complete peanuts" cartoons in sequential hardcover volumes. it's a toney production. so far 7 have been issued. that's the "good". the "bad" is each volume costs $60 something. well done, fantagraphic books. that price should scare most readers off.

the star, or scene-stealer, of the strip is marcie, who is inexplicably strange. and kooky. (i also like linus when he's philosophizing or quoting what he calls "scripture".)

another topping moment is peppermint patty's ad in the personals: "help wanted: attractive young lady can't remember history dates. doesn't understand fractions. call patricia reichardt at the number below." wonderful stuff.

wouldn't the world be a better place with the great pumpkin (dispensing his halloween justice)?

feminism exhumed

linda hirshman in today's "slate" (see article here) disinters the old feminist bugaboo of "hysteria"* in rushing to the support of hillary clinton.

hirshman asks, à propos of hillary, whether she belongs in the company of lucia di lammermoor, lady macbeth, and "anna o" from freud's quack studies. the answer is a gimme. no. she doesn't. hillary isn't an hysteric. in fact, she appears to have no feelings at all. she is gelid. the lady macbeth comparison is nice but doesn't quite apply: hillary would never fall apart after attaining power.

who then are hillary's natural analogues? two immediately spring to mind: nurse ratched from "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" and mrs danvers from hitchcock's "rebecca". but i think hillary's real affinity is with norma desmond from "sunset boulevard": a faded star, desperate for the limelight, who doesn't realise the audience has moved on. presidential politics is still big, it's hillary who got small.

*(a word i'm glad to say jane austen uses frequently)

mens rea

those who pooh-pooh the immanence of evil have obviously never watched "hannah montana".

a grub in troub

barry humphries has always said in extenuation of his characters' excesses that les patterson—or to use the full honorific, dr sir leslie colin patterson, mbe—is a mild version of the typical australian parliamentarian. (amazingly, some australians pretend to be offended by this.)

this week humphries has been vindicated by shenanigans out west. troy buswell, leader of her majesty's opposition in western oz, has just lowered himself fully into the soup. buswell is in troub for bra-snapping women in his office and sniffing the chair of a female staffer immediately after she left it.

buswell is obviously not well.

a heap of broken images

the way educators (tertiary and secondary) have dismantled and then abandoned the canon has been one of the most impressive feats of military strategy since erwin rommel retook el alamein (against superior forces). this strategy may have been improvised on the fly but it has been brilliant nonetheless.

how to destroy the west's incomparable cultural inheritance in 5 easy steps:

1. criticize the canon for not being inclusive enough.
2. adulterate it with inferior "steerage class" literature reflecting the new diversity.
3. further adulterate the syllabus with tv shows and movies.
4. eliminate all qualitative judgments.
5. admit the triviality of the subject and abandon it altogether.

unfortunately the problem with this otherwise winning strategy is that it produces too many people incapable of recognising literate jokes when they encounter them; in woody allen films, for instance: "when it comes to women i'm the winner of the august strindberg award". it also greatly reduces one's ability to insult others in very sophisticated ways, as joseph epstein did in this morning's edition of the "wall street journal": "i have always considered the clintons as little more than a branch of william faulkner's snopes family, in their cases snopeses who have given high sat scores a bad name". these are important "life skills".

it is simply negligent of educators to graduate students who aren't equipped to appreciate jokes they must "process" when watching "the simpsons". really, what else is education for? parents have a right to be upset.

circadian rhythms

or, as i prefer to call it, the grasmere divide. it describes two types of people: wordsworths and coleridges. wordsworths are early risers, of haleful habits, who (alas) tend to be of earnest (if not slightly pious) disposition. coleridges are unreliable, indulgers in opiates, inveterate stayers-up-late, sleepers-in, and of dissolute habits generally.

because i like to get up early i realise, to my chagrin, that i'm a wordsworth. this is not good. wordsworths are bores. coleridges are much better company: being more frivolous, better talkers, and entertaining carousers.

whether it's due to asperger's or simple selfishness i prefer to be up by six, when the world is unpeopled (like the london pictured in "composed upon westminster bridge") and the lemon-scented gums (pictured) are at their most fragrant; running on the beach and listening to classic fm; before the air is soupy with diesel fumes and the hub-bub of commerce has been turned up to "eleven".

evenings are good. but mornings are better.

nevermind world peace,

bring back blue smarties!

the foul english breakfast

with the exception of marmelade and the made-for-tv glamour of nigella lawson's kitchen concoctions, english food is indisputably disgusting. it is nowhere more disgusting than the muck known as "the full english breakfast". (one's mind drifts back to the opening of "withnail and i" when marwood takes breakfast in a camden town "caff": all "news of the world", bad teeth, and frying eggs swimming in rancid oil.)

and yet i'm openly glad the english keep eating as they do. that despite the bullying of government and the medical profession, the cajoling of rick stein and nigella, and the swearing of gordon ramsay, i'm glad the english remain as wedded to bad food as they were when orwell, in sisyphean fashion, wrote his famous essay "in defence of english cooking". after all, one of the things which makes the english so immemorially english is their stoic consumption of dreadful food.

so i was especially glad to see that some english schoolchildren had thwarted the new "healthy foods" régime in school tuckshops by smuggling in the contraband junkfood: fizzy drink, chips, chocolate bars and the like (see story here). echoes of harriet tubman's underground railroad, the relief of mafeking, and the famous "turkey twizzler revolt" against jamie oliver in east end comprehensives.

it's heartening to see that despite the unremitting attempts to turn them into europeans the english remain, at the table anyway, thoroughly podsnappingly english. it is greatly to their credit, as it says in "pinafore".

kagan 1, fukuyama 0

of all the articles, in all the foreign policy journals, in all the world, none was as dumb as francis fukuyama's announcement that we have reached "the end of history" and the final triumph of western liberal democracy. all quite presumptuous and wrong.

unlike coca-cola, the kind of liberal social order fukuyama has in mind has never been much liked around the world. it only ever existed among a tiny handful of western nations (and post-ww2 japan). it is grudgingly admitted in qualified form in asia and south america, is non-existent in africa, and is violently repudiated in the middle east.

robert kagan's new book "the return of history and the end of dreams" (clumsy title) is much closer to the mark. kagan describes the world as it really is: authoritarian, increasingly protectionist, and minatory.

if the incarnadine twentieth century has taught us anything (and, of course, it hasn't), it is the precariousness of civilization. ideology—the nelson muntz of politics—is back, refreshed, and full of beans. in temper and circumstance we are cosily close to the 1930s.

history isn't over. the world remains, as ever, a work in progress. or, in this case, regress.

the wisdom of alex doonesbury

an 8 year old tells it like it is.

the revenge of malthus

i remember being introduced to the concept of "scarcity" in economics as a 14 year old. but this is really the first time i've seen the phenom in operation. the news nowadays is all about "shortages": fuel (thanks, china), food, water, housing, eligible dates and parking spaces. the only thing there's a surplus of is muslims, and nobody wants those. in a particularly cruel example toy-makers are no longer manufacturing the "horrible gelatinous blob" action-figure from "futurama". now that's really going to hurt.

something borrowed, something made

my two favourite expressions du jour are:

"sour quince log"
indicative, taken from the "who shot mr burns?" episode of "the simpsons"; to describe anything unappetizing or disagreeable, e.g. hilary clinton or that tv show in which meredith tergiversates endlessly between mcstinky and mcsleazy ("grey's anatomy").

"the puck is in the mail"
a variation of "the cheque is in the mail" dodge, employed when one is forgetful or behindhand in some business. originates from the months i have spent waiting for a special ice hockey puck to be shipped from canada.

same shot taken in the sunlight

now what colour is it? carmine?

vermilion?

shiraz? magenta-ish? colours are always a "shot in the dark" (to use a pink pantherism) when one is colourblind. contentious.

anyway, more of autumn showing off.