I have, up until this point, found no reason to partake in the latest online craze – Facebook’s 25 Random Things About You. It’s simply an online chain letter that involves sharing 25 ‘random’ facts about yourself with the Facebook community, which has made me wonder not about the hundreds of facts I’ve been reading about people, but about the very nature of randomness itself. And before I get too existential I now present:

25 Random Things. Literally.

1. iPod Shuffle
2. Roulette
3. Not Natural Selection
4. Door prizes
5. Chaos theory
6. Schrödinger’s cat
7. Tony Abbot
8. People who sneeze in multiples
9. Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky
10. Wikipedia’s Random Articles
11. Picking a card, any card
12. How To Be Random
13. Flash mobs (about 4 years ago)
14. X: Ω → Y (an equation for a random variable in a measurable space)
15. Pseudo-random numbers
16. Random Cats
17. Computer RAM (Random-access memory)
18. Lady Sovereign
19. Some acts of kindness
20. Some drug tests
21. Dice
22. True Random Number Generator
23. Random password generator
24. The Emo Band-Name Generator
25. Radioactive decay

The office that I work in has been lacking a good coffee table for some time now. But this week a co-worker and I found an unused filing cabinet and turned its drawers into a beautiful, industrial-type coffee table.

I am deeply in love with our new Filing Coffee Table. But I am being realistic about its future, especially in the context of the Global Financial Crisis. After all it doesn’t exactly scream ‘professionalism’ and makes it look like we filed for bankruptcy just before overturning the drawers. But I like to think that it romanticises bankruptcy somewhat. And surely bankruptcy could do with some good PR at the moment. Right?

A recent trip to the MYER (they spell it all in caps yeah?) store in the city turned out to be more productive than simply buying a perfumey birthday present for Sister #2.

Everytime I wanted to sample a bottle of pretty smells the MYER lady sprayed a piece of cardboard for me to sniff. And keep. In the end I had an abundance of cards that smelt like girls and bore the branding of perfume companies. Perfect for DIY Business Cards or even Calling Cards given their recent comeback. For example:

Plus who wouldn’t want a tagline like ‘Feminine. Fresh. Modern.’?

Not all of the perfume cards, however, were rectangles. But not to fear because there are uses for the crazier-shaped cards too:

But really, nothing is quite as satisfactory as handing your 50-or-so perfume cards back to the MYER lady and asking her, ‘Which one was the Mania Femme again?’.

The first post on a new blog is always boring. Boring and pointless. Much like the first page of a diary that reads Dear Diary, today I decided to start a diary. Or the first ball of a backyard cricket match which you can never ‘get out’ on.

So since first blog posts are so redundant I will be self-indulgent with mine and confess to committing a serious – but common enough – crime: starting blogs and never looking at them again.

My first blog was called Carving Stones With Birds – a blog title that I thought quirky and clever at the time, but which has not aged well. I didn’t post anything bar a picture of a game of ‘Animal Snap’ on this blog.

Following this dismal failure I started Crappy Blog #2 which I called Red Rubber Balls. Another terribly-named blog that received only a pic of a You Am I album, a pic of a black kid wearing massive glasses (which I still kinda like) and a cringe-worthy bio – I am a boy. This blog is of a boy, with a quill and a spare evening. Sit back or lean forward. Devour. I can’t have been in a good place when I wrote that.

My best effort before this current blog was one which I wrote under the pseudonym of a character called Charlie Messier – a divorced, 51-year-old who lived with his grandmother and believed in open relationships.

That’s Charlie above. Or what I thought Charlie should look like. (FYI, the real Charles Messier – from whom I stole the name – was actually a cool French astronomer who cataloged a whole lot of deep sky objects. Impress your lover with this info some time.)

Now that I’ve confessed all this I can finally concentrate on this blog or – metaphorically speaking – the second ball of the game which will probably be really fast and bowl me out for a duck anyway.