After watching the news over the weekend, I’ve got a question about the Earth Summit. What the hell is our government doing? Our esteemed Prime Minister John Howard is zipping around the world claiming that somehow we Australians are special and shouldn’t have to be part of legally binding global greenhouse gas reductions?!

Oh, terrific. And if we do that, so can every other country in the world, and then where will we be? "Oh yes, we in Pollutia believe our particular target should be a 100% increase in our greenhouse gas production, because that way we’ll make more money." Terrific.

I wouldn’t blame Bill Clinton if he’d wanted to trip Howard up. But no, that’s not actually what happened. My sources have told me that the CIA actually plotted to trip up John Howard - as revenge for the Clinton/Greg Norman Incident.

Of course, we all know Clinton was sloshed as a president, that’s why he fell over. Fortunately John Howard is too boring to be even the slightest bit tipsy, so the plan failed. But the evidence is clear - it was no accident!

It’s true! Look at the news footage very carefully and you’ll see a dark figure put banana skin on the ground in front of Howard and then slip away into the shadows.

I think this is unacceptable behaviour. Fun, yes, but unacceptable. It’s a slap in the face from the US, and I don’t think we should stand for it! I SAY WE DECLARE WAR NOW!

I don’t care if they’ve got enough firepower to destroy the world a dozen times over and all we’ve got is some irritated wallabies! We’ll show them that they can’t insult our country and get away with it! My fellow Australians! Be ready! We attack at dawn!

Well, on Tuesday morning a telephone guy came around, fiddled with a few things, tested it all out and officially opened the new Telephone Service To Daniel’s Desk. Hooray I thought, people can ring me. And they did.

After only about an hour, I’d had four calls for someone else - a someone else who is apparently the corporate internal newsletter editor. I spoke to her a little later and she was genuinely surprised that I had that number. But she stopped giving it to other people, and I got no more calls for her.

But it gets better. On Wednesday afternoon the phone rang again. I picked it up and it turned out to be ABC Radio News. "We were just wondering if we could get an official comment on the staff demonstration earlier today outside your corporate headquarters".

So I did what any responsible person would do. I told them that the official corporate line was that "those people are cranks, nothing more, nothing less. They’ve got no real grievance, they’re just having a whinge for no good reason. They ought to get haircuts, get real jobs, and sod off and stop interrupting us making more money. We’ve identified them all through closed circuit television and intend to sack them all forthwith!"

Or maybe I just found the right number for Media Liaison and transferred the guy to it.

Phone update: Nope.

Last night the girl at Safeway kept staring at me while we were queuing at the checkout. Personally, I can’t help notice these things, in fact I usually think someone’s staring at me when nobody is. She definitely was though.

What could it be? Had my double been on Australia’s Most Wanted the night before? Was there a security bulletin about me in the staff room? Wanted: Bowen, Daniel. Suspected terrorist and shoplifter. Approach with Caution! Were they looking out for me? I started to feel guilty. I hadn’t felt this guilty since the one and only time I was asked, in the same supermarket, to open my bag so they could look in. (I’ll tell you, that hasn’t happened once when I’ve been wearing a tie!)

She kept looking back at me. Uh oh, could it be she … Hey, don’t chat me up now, my wife’s here!

But she asked "are you somebody famous?" I don’t consider myself even the remotest bit famous. Okay, so my face is plastered over my web page to frighten away children and small animals, but the site is hardly setting the world alight, and I have yet to meet anybody I didn’t know who’s actually seen it.

I told her no. She looked again, and then said "don’t take this the wrong way, but have you heard of The Wiggles?" We’ve got a two year-old, of course we’ve heard of The Wiggles. There’s probably not a single parent in the country that hasn’t heard of them, despatched large amounts of money in their direction in return for their videos and CDs, and perhaps even taken offspring to their concerts.

"’Cos you look like Greg."

I look like Greg?! No way do I look like Greg! Sure, I can impersonate his slightly squeaky voice when I take the mickey out of his piss-weak magic routines ("Hello everybody, I’m Magic Greg" - it’s the only blot on an otherwise spotless performance), but I no more look like Greg than Greg looks like me. From a distance of three miles in a fog, as seen by a short-sighted eye-patched pirate, perhaps I do look like Greg. But seen by a checkout-chick from three feet away in a well-lit supermarket, no way.

So who was on Australia’s Most Wanted the other night, anyway?

I’ve talked before about my neighbours, and their odd ideas about refuse disposal. Well, now someone’s decided to start clearing out some of the furniture and put it out on the street, someone else has decided it shouldn’t be on the street (and it shouldn’t), and the result is that there’s now an armchair in the garden.

Now I’m not against furniture in gardens per se. A nice bench and a fountain would look really nice in the block’s communal garden. Perhaps polish it off with some landscaping - perhaps a little path around the fountain and a few shrubberies. But an armchair tipped over the wall with a view of the dead possum just doesn’t work. Not even a reasonably nice armchair like this one. (No, it’s not so nice that I’d want to acquire it.)

With the flat downstairs from us now empty again (and it looks directly onto the garden), it’ll be interesting to see if it gets let before someone moves the chair. What would your impression be on looking out of the livingroom window of an otherwise very nice flat and seeing a deserted armchair sitting overturned in the garden?

Well, both Tuesday and Wednesday came and went, and in fact it’s Friday and the phone hasn’t arrived on my desk. Or to be more accurate, the phone is there, as it has been all along, but it’s not connected. Actually, to be completely accurate, it’s connected to the wall, but somewhere in the guts of the building, where the telephone engineers go to get away from the rest of the human race and wade knee-deep in cables, the appropriate plug is not secure in the appropriate socket. So it doesn’t work.

All this is pretty ironic considering I’m working at a telephone company. They now say Monday will be the day of deliverance, the excuse apparently being that they’ve run out of lines in the building. Hmm. Yeah. Right.

Meanwhile working in the city is turning my week into a bit of a lunchfest. So many of my current or former colleagues are within screaming distance (as the crow flies) that I doubt if a week will go by without me having lunch with at least a few of them.

The great End-Of-The-Tax-Year-Quick-Let’s-Spend-The-Money hardware binge continues. Next card off the rank and into the PC is a video capture board. Cool, so now I’ll be able to put snippets of video and pictures all over the web pages. If I can get the thing to work, that is! I think the next thing, if the budget allows, is to splash out on a new chair - preferably one that isn’t falling apart like the one I’m sitting on is.

The news from work is that I’ll get a phone of my very own either tomorrow or Wednesday, so I can stop bothering the guy I sit next to for his all the time. Well okay, not all the time. Some of the time.

In the world today, some countries are thriving… some are not. For those that are not, there are many signs… civil war and unrest… starvation, famine… drought, flood…

But what would be the most insulting and humiliating thing for a country? I’ll tell you what: Their currency being given away free in Corn Flakes packets.

I’m not joking - Sanitarium Corn Flakes at the moment has a promotion - Currencies of the World. I have in my hand a note from the Bank Polski for 50 somethings… Zlotych? Looks genuine. Seems to be dated 1988, so it’s probably worth practically zilch by now. In fact, the picture of the guy on the note looks severely pre-Perestroika.

So, you might be wondering what other countries’ money is being given away with breakfast cereal. Here’s what the list on the back of the box says:

• Poland; Latvia; Belarus; Yugloslavia; Russia; Indonesia; Tajikistan; Croatia; Peru; Nicaragua; the United States and Great Britain.

Nah, just kidding on the last two. But it raises the question… I wonder if anybody has seen any Aussie currency in their local breakfast cereal?

Well, I just finished putting my computer back together after minor surgery. It’s a little intimidating for someone like me, who’s used to messing around with software configurations, installations, palpitations and exasperations, but not so used to opening up the lid and rummaging around inside the box. I’m a software geek, not a hardware geek.

Messing around with the software, the worst you can do is have to install it again. Messing around with hardware, the worst you can do is bend some pins, break a cable, drop a large screw somewhere in the innards, electrocute everything and eat the CPU. Make a false move, and it could get expensive.

But it had to be done. Today’s modern software is more efficient than ever before at earning big bucks for hard drive, memory and CPU manufacturers. This time it was the hard drive that ran out of space. There was no getting round it, it was time to upgrade from having <number of megabytes that sounded really impressive a couple of years ago> to <number of gigabytes that sounds quite impressive now but will sound pathetic two years from now>.

So after gingerly carrying the thing home (who could believe you could fit so much in a box so small), backing up all my files just in case, scratching my head reading the installation manual, delicately plugging things in and unplugging and adjusting the jumper switches and replugging and wrestling with the BIOS and doing partitions and scans and checking for high blood pressure (mine, not the computer’s), it all seems to work. Nothing seems to have broken.

And I can’t believe I even thought about attempting it on Friday the 13th.