Salt and corrosion

The City by the Sea has a new public sculpture and it looks like this. Not that you can tell from the photo what it looks like. I assume it's the metal thing and not the man. Some sort of butterfly? I suppose I could go and have a look myself.

Yesterday I saw a restaurant advertising for people to book in for their Christmas functions. Really? Perhaps it's a Christmas in July thing (which some people here do to get the whole Christmas-in-winter experience*), but it doesn't specify that. Perhaps it really is for Christmas.

Angela is trying to make me enter a competition to win a Blackberry because 'you need to get with the times, Alicia'. She found a business magazine somewhere, featuring this competion: Which famous figure from history would you hire to work for your company, and why? Answer in twenty-five words. I have declined to enter because I don't want a Blackberry and I can't think of anyone famous I'd want to hire, but Angela has already filled her form in. She would employ Helen Keller. She wouldn't tell me why, in case I copied her idea. What about you? (If it's any good, I might steal your comment and use it as my entry.)



* I disapprove of Christmas in July. The ship has sailed now but I think someone should have nipped it in the bud (if I may mix my metaphors) and made it Christmas in June instead. Specifically, Christmas on 25 June. More symmetrical.

Today's email for doctors brought news of a new anatomy book for children: Tummy and Guts, featuring Penny Pancreas and Benny Brain. I'm no anatomist, but that's not where I thought the brain was. Shouldn't it be Penny Pancreas and Lenny Liver? Kenny Kidney?

There is a new book in the Gormenghast trilogy! Er, well, I suppose it isn't a trilogy now there are four books, is it? Anyway, I loved the first two but wasn't all that keen on the final one (more fuel for my mother's belief that the last book in a series is always a let-down), so I'm not sure how I feel about the new one. Perhaps I will wait until it appears in the library. Or, more likely, I will forget about it for a while until one day when I will buy it on a whim and be horribly disappointed.

When my mother asks people if they would like a hot drink, she always says, 'Can I get you a drink? Coffee, tea, Bonox?' Bonox is a brand of beef stock cube. No-one ever asks for it, and even if they did, I don't think she has any. I've always thought this was some little family joke, but yesterday, showing some visitors into his office, my boss said, 'Can I get you a drink? Coffee, tea, Bonox?' The exact formula my mother uses! I said to Brian, 'My mother says that!' and he said, 'Yes, it's from an old, old ad.' For Bonox, I assume. So there we go.

Despite having too many pointless diversions to fill my waking hours, I'm thinking of buying a keyboard. A musical keyboard, I mean. I already own several computer keyboards. I also own a piano, in the sense that it's in my house, but not in the sense that I could dispose of it if I wanted to (it's a family piano). The piano, though, is ancient and not entirely in tune, and last time the tuner came he said that would be as good as it got. So I have a decorative piano. Anyway, I had piano lessons as a littlie; I wasn't terribly good or terribly enthusiastic, and I eventually switched to woodwind instruments. I haven't played any of them for ages, but lately the keyboard is speaking to me. So I'm making a list of pros and cons. Pro: It's good to learn new things (or, in this case, re-learn an old thing). Cons: I already have a shelf full of neglected instruments (a flute, a clarinet, several recorders, several tin whistles and an ocarina); I don't need another sedentary hobby; I was a rubbish piano player anyway. I think the cons have it, don't you? I was looking at sheet music on the internet last night and downloaded some piano music anyway, then I downloaded a few pieces for flute and recorder too. It's just... if I imagine peeking in my own window and seeing myself playing the piano, that seems diligent and clever; looking in at myself tootling away at a recorder like a big pixie just seems a bit sad.

Speaking of recorders, do small children in other countries learn the flutophone? Or is that just an Australian thing? Or was it just an Australia-in-the-early-80s thing, and no-one knows what I'm talking about?

What else? Oh, Telstra/Bigpond, whatever they call themselves. My ISP. I am sure they have a Department of Annoyances. Their most recent triumph has been the announcement that they are closing Bigpond Movies, which is a DVD rental by mail service like Netflix. I'm quite sad about this. I joined years ago when I needed to watch some old films for university, films that weren't in the local DVD stores and weren't available to buy anywhere. Now they've got this mad idea that, instead of renting one of their 45,000 DVDs, customers will instead all choose to download from their selection of 2,500 films. That's not going to happen, Bigpond Movies. If I wanted a choice like that, I'd stick with the local Blockbuster. I think a lot of customers will, like me, take up the offer from another company to transfer our DVD queues to them and get the first couple of months half-price.

Finally, here is a thing: the average colour of the New York sky.

Royal wedding celebrations: this man is going to let a friend bigamously marry his pet buffalo and have the reception at the Humpty Doo pub. No, I don't understand any of it either.

Today I made an appointment to meet with a representative of a bank next week. The bank's slogan is 'Bendigo starts with U'. I hope they're better with numbers than with spelling. Also, I had a phone call from a man named Dean Martin, which I thought was slightly amusing, though not as amusing as the office manager did when she put his call through to me. The new office girl? Not so amused. Not amused at all, in fact. She might be right there.

Help me with my civic duty, f-list!

The City by the Sea's council is considering changing our bins. At the moment, the council provides each house with an 80 litre rubbish bin that is collected weekly and a 240 litre mixed recycling bin (papers, tins, plastics) that is collected fortnightly. The fees for this are in the yearly rates.

I (and I assume, many others) also have a 240 litre green waste bin, for which I pay a private contractor $9 per collection (I have mine collected monthly), which has nothing to do with the council. I put my food scraps in the compost bin and/or the worm farm.

The council has just sent out a survey checking interest in three new bin options. These aren't mutually exclusive; we get a YES/NO vote for each.

( The options )

There is also a comments box, which I have used to suggest daylight collection times. Our bins are currently collected between 9pm and dawn, which means I can be woken up four times each bin night and I'm over that. They have explained before that the collection must be done at night because children are running about during the day and might be squashed; I think it has more to do with the bin men enjoying the higher rate of pay that would apply to night work.

Anyway, what do you think? Do you have genius rubbish collecting schemes that I could suggest?



Last night I saw an advertisement for coverage of the forthcoming royal wedding. On this particular network, the ceremony will be presented by people called 'Fitzy and Wippa'. So that's classy.



I found an old magazine at the back of the cupboard. In it was an advertisement in the form of a travel diary. It was 'the story of two girls who set out to see how much they could get out of one day' fuelled by a glass of Berocca. What they got out of their one day was this:

At dawn, they were in the South Island of New Zealand, where they climbed a mountain. Following that, they flew to Australia, where they went to Uluru and rode camels in the afternoon. They then flew to Thailand, where they went to the night markets in Bangkok. Finally, they went to India to see the Taj Mahal, where the photos showed them standing in sunshine. They finish by writing: WE MADE IT IN ONE DAY.

I have to doubt that. I think they'd be struggling to do just the New Zealand and Australian legs in one day, unless they caught some fortuitously timed flights. Or does 'one day' mean more than twenty-four hours, given that they'd be crossing multiple time zones? Or is it just a reminder of a more innocent time (2004), when international travel didn't involve so much faffing about at the airport?

1. I seem to be a bit out of sorts lately. Just blah. I see something and think I should write an entry about it, but don't. So maybe doing a ten-point list will clear the backlog.

( Toilet tissue illness, spammers who have lost their whimsy, lotto syndicates and that little radio I bought at the Post Office many years ago )

This made me laugh.

Angela was telling me about a train trip she took on the weekend. The boy sitting behind her was doing a crossword and he was reading the clues to his father who didn't know any of them, until the boy said, 'What's another word for eggplant?' and his father said it was an artichoke. Angela: 'After all that, I wanted to lean over the back of the seat and say, "IT'S AN AUBERGINE!" but I just gritted my teeth instead.' Probably the best course of action, I think. But is it ever appropriate to tell (not shout) crossword answers to strangers?

[Poll #1681935]

The TAFE (a technical and vocational college) building I pass every day has a new advertisement plastered over its front windows. It is a giant portrait of a young man and a row of hats, all the hats he could wear if he studied at TAFE. There is a hard hat, a chef's hat and a security guard's hat. They are straightforward. After them there is a beanie. What occupation has a beanie as its uniform? I suppose if he did the horticulture course, he would need to keep his head warm while he was out in the garden? There is also what I think of as a lumberjack's hat, with furry ear flaps. That is for the forestry courses, maybe?

His final headwear option is a Viking helmet. I'd like to know what qualification TAFE is offering that leads to wearing that. Perhaps they start with a Certificate IV in Looting and Pillaging, and work up to a Diploma in Advanced Vikingry? I have to think there is not a big demand for people with these skills, but good on TAFE for giving people the option.

You know how much I like collective nouns? Marvel at this!

Last night I saw an advertisement in which a woman, asleep in bed, was woken by mysterious noises in her kitchen. Imagine it: creeping down the corridor, dreading what she'd find when she opened the door. It was nail-biting stuff, I can tell you. And what did she find? ( It's pretty scary )

This was followed by an ad for a sheep worming treatment. Obviously these ads are only on because this is a farming area. I sometimes wonder what special urban products we don't get to see ads for here in the country.

There is a radio station here that for many years has declared the tenth month of the year to be Rocktober. I am sure they are not the first to think of that pun. In recent years, men have been encouraged to grow moustaches in the eleventh month of the year as part of Movember. And yesterday I saw an advertisement from a bed and bedding shop announcing their annual Sleptember sale. Which doesn't work, does it? You don't go to slep at night. It should be Sleeptember, but then that ruins the rhyme. I don't think Capt'n Snooze has given this enough thought. Not as much thought as I have, at any rate.

Perhaps the internet deserves its own month, maybe Webuary? Sorry. Then I thought May is so good, we could have another month to celebrate it: Maypril. Then, you will be pleased to learn, I was so taken with the idea of Maypril that I stopped coming up with monthly puns. (Although I think January has promise given all the things that rhyme with 'jan'. July, not so much.)

The medical newspaper we get at work has a shocked paragraph in this week's Global Briefs section about a survey of 3,000 people that revealed 'the average Briton consumed 56 sausages, 54 burgers, 81 cans of beer and 73 bags of chips as part of their diet over summer'. That seems like an awful lot, doesn't it? It doesn't really give enough information to establish how representative it is, though.

Underneath that, the paper reports that we are closer to a treatment for ebola. Woo for compound class phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers!

Also, Australian farmers have apparently grown a super-pineapple. Evildoers beware.

Someone put me on hold on the phone today and they had the local radio station as their hold music. I'm not keen on zany radio presenters at the best of times, but, oh dear, today I was exposed to the local breakfast 'crew' and it was dire. Fortunately, they went to an ad before I threw the phone out the window.

Unfortunately, the ad was for a dodgy motor finance company called Motor Finance Wizard, and I've had their jingle in my head all day. So I'd thought I'd share it round.

( Motor Finance Wizard says, 'Yes!' )

Sorry.