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?

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.