I was raised in an outer sub­urb of Mel­bourne called Wat­so­nia. The only real thing of note in Wat­so­nia is the Simp­son Army Bar­racks which began life as the Wat­so­nia Mil­i­tary Camp in WWII. Appar­ently there’s lots of com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment at the Army Bar­racks which means that if Aus­tralia is ever invaded Wat­so­nia would be one of the first places likely to be bombed. At least that’s what I think I heard some kid at school say once.

Apart from the Army Bar­racks and the Wat­so­nia Library — be kind to your local librar­ian — there’s not much else hap­pen­ing in Wat­so­nia. Although the sight of Jenny Mack­lin MP cam­paign­ing out­side the Wat­so­nia Bake­house dur­ing elec­tion times is worth vis­it­ing town for. If Wat­so­nia was my bio­log­i­cal father then I could be said to have Daddy Issues.

They say that Aus­tralians have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with the ‘burbs and  I have a love-hate-lust-domestic vio­lence rela­tion­ship with Wat­so­nia. And when I vis­ited the place this week­end past I was con­fronted by the sight of an aban­doned TV sit­ting on top of a boul­der, around the cor­ner from the Wat­so­nia BP.

It was sooo Wat­so­nia. I loved and hated and lusted for and wanted to beat that TV on the rock. But I should stop rag­ging on my home­town now. Thankyou blog for the ther­apy times. See you next session.

The good ol’ author pic is the ire of almost all authors. Often found on the back sleeve of a book, it’s easy to see why the com­mon author treats their back-of-the-book pic with gen­eral dis­dain. There’s a rea­son movie direc­tors don’t flash their por­taits onto the big screen at the end of their movies. I mean, would the final scene of Thelma & Louise have the same impact if it was fol­lowed by this?

But to undi­gress (not an offi­cial word) my label mate at Hardie Grant Egmont, author Chris Mor­phew, recently blogged about his own author pics and pro­ceeded to label one of my author pics as a ‘Clas­sic Mope’.

I think he’s prob­a­bly right. Some other favourite clas­sic author poses include:

The Guru Pose.

The ‘I’m so doey-eyed how could you not believe me?’ Pose.

And the ‘I signed a movie con­tract and hired a styl­ist” Pose.

If a clas­sic author pose can­not be struck the next best way to show your­self as an author is to turn the author photo black and white.

Noth­ing says ‘author’ more than grayscal­ing the author pic.

And here’s my label-mate Chris Mor­phew author-ised.

Although I guess there are some peo­ple who are just never going to look like authors.

I don’t know why I like the Sad Clowns so. Ever since House­mate #1 acquired the paint­ing of the clowns sit­ting on clouds of bald ogre-type man-heads I have liked them.

Clowns are the poor occasion’s Santa. They come out for birth­days and coun­try fairs — things which become less awe­some as we grow old. So it seems appro­pri­ate that these clowns should appear so despon­dent. Which is just why I like them. They are my friends. No mat­ter how mis­er­able I feel they always look worse and I love them for it. And I thought the Sad Clowns should cheer other peo­ple up too. So I cre­ated the below moti­va­tional poster.

Good on you Sad Clown and lit­tle midget-Sad Clown. You make me live!

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?