Harpo gets to do something fun We are playing at the Barleycorn on the weekend which is a gig I've been looking forward to for some time. It has been much too long since I've been on stage and I do enjoy it so. The People too have been deprived of our particular brand of hot rock and are starting to get restless. The Spanish civil war started in much the same way.

So, anyway, it should be fun.

  ¶ 4:00 pm 0 comments

  Sporting capital of the world I gathered with some mates at a pub in Richmond to watch the quarterfinal between Australia and Japan.

A footy game at the MCG had finished only a few hours earlier so obviously the room was full of beefy lads with overdeveloped foreheads, product-filled hair, upturned collars, bourbon and cokes and brilliant bon mots about fat chicks, car theft and homos.

I'm glad they were getting into the soccer. Good on them. Naturally the only thing they could think of to encourage our tiring representatives as the game wore on was to cry out “Aussie Aussie Aussie” at the TV screen at which some others answered with the clever reply “oi oi oi” which struck almost everybody in the room as pure genius. I was certainly cheered by such a creative display of pride in one's homeland.

They howled as one with surprise and indignation whenever somebody fell to the ground after a tackle. They were endearingly bewildered by the red card as if we were never going to suffer harsh decisions. One of them wittily described the referee as a homo. Oh how everybody laughed.

The game itself was an entertaining spectacle. The Japanese were as well-organised and sharp as expected and Australia had a few good patches. The Aussies played a valiant last 45 minutes a man down in difficult conditions and the draw after extra time was actually a good result against a team better and ranked higher than us. A couple of guys gave tired penalties at the end and out we went. After the dreadful, dreadful displays in the first two games, this match I rather enjoyed.

My footy-loving neighbours in the bar were not so generous. When they were finally able to remember his name they had same things to say about Graeme Arnold and how quickly that homo should be fired.

  ¶ 12:45 pm 1 comments

  Like a native I get down, out of kilter and bored from time to time, it's true. When that happens I like to start teaching myself a new language.

This winter I've been giving Chinese a go and it's certainly a challenging language to try. I stroll down Little Bourke St looking at all the signs and saying to myself “wouldn't it be nice if I could read that” which is essentially the level of my current fluency in the language.

In fact I know only a few phrases.

Immersion is certainly the name of the game when you try to learn a language so I am culling my DVDs (does anybody want my Gary Oldman collection? I also have some of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmeses you can take) and replacing them with Chinese language ones.

I have a number of the Hong Kong Jackie Chan movies dubbed into Mandarin now and after watching them, these are the Chinese phrases I know:

• Stop!
• Don't hit my glasses
• We're chasing drug-peddling pirates with handguns
• Ring my insurance agency
• Get him!
• This soybean curd is off
• Explosives? Explosives!?
• Guarded by an electric fence, trained killer henchmen and a shark tank? No problem. Watch this!
• Let her go, you fiend
• I need more stuntmen
• That police officer has foiled my evil plans once again
• Gosh those Mitsubishis are good cars

and, of course:

• Hhhyyyaaaaaa!!

  ¶ 3:00 pm 7 comments

  Oh rats My black heart is still filled with hate and the searing weight of my fury is today about to land on freakin' lab rats.

I can't stand lab rats. I hate their unnatural lack of disease with their own special breeding programmes and whatnot, I hate their status as the last word before you get to humans when scientists are testing theories, I really hate that whole rattier than thou attitude they have going. I hate them.

Worst of all is their lack of imagination. Make one go through a maze and offer it cheese at the end and your work is done. It'll power through that freakin' maze until the end of time expecting some more cheese. The stupid lab rat is not going to stop occasionally and contemplate Kierkegaard or write a string quartet or even just take a random left-turn because it's a Wednesday. No. It'll just go straight for the freakin' cheese. Stupid lab rat.

The thing that brought these miserable creatures to mind was seeing people driving this afternoon. Light goes yellow? Accelerate. Here's a clue: it doesn't make a difference. All it does is say to the world “I am well aware that I was supposed to have stopped but I'm going anyway.”

The cheese hypnotises the lab rat and all thought ceases.

It's only a little thing — and I'm in a sufficiently mad funk at the moment to get worked up about little things — but if you're going to run the light just sail blithely through the intersection. Save fuel. Don't look like a freakin' lab rat.

  ¶ 5:45 pm 2 comments

  Leave me alone Here's a tip. If you are sneezing you don't actually need to vocalise at the same time. It is perfectly possible for you to sneeze by simply expelling air without engaging the vocal cords at all.

Try it.

Please just try sneezing without your loud, shouty accompaniment.

Please.

Just try it.

  ¶ 3:30 pm 19 comments