Zowee. On Thursday night, I was watching Newsradio on Channel 10. I don’t usually watch it, so I’m not familiar with the characters or actors. I was trying to work out where I’d heard one of the actors’ voices before. Then I realised and said "Hi, I’m Troy McLure!"

What’s this got to do with anything? Well, about 12 hours later, watching the morning news, they said the bloke in question, Phil Hartman, was dead. A presumably still is. Zowee.

I’ve been thinking this for a while… somebody should organise betting or some kind of competition on which famous celebrity is going to die next. Okay, so Frank Sinatra probably wasn’t too hard to predict given his age and condition, but how about ol’ Phil baby, or perhaps Kevin Lloyd? Or Diana? Who foresaw their departure for that great dressing room in the sky?

Who’ll be next? People could register their predictions and win prizes if they were right. With extra points for correctly guessing the cause of death. Ummm… but being involved in it would have to void your entry.

Postscript: I’ve since found out it’s called the Dead Pool, based on a Clint Eastwood movie of that name. There’s plenty of them running on the Net, for example, www.stiffs.com.

Oh sure… so just after I proclaim to the world my wish to be breathalised, L gets stopped and done. Yep, out driving last night, and just a few hundred metres from home, she found a booze bus.

The way she told it, it sounded like a bit of an anti-climax. A big burly policewoman asked her to blow into a machine, and that was about it. She almost drove straight home to give me directions to it, but ah well, my turn will come.

I often tell my friends about my quest for the perfect job. This is something we who do contracting can indulge in. Changing jobs every few months, seeing lots of new faces and new work environments means you can do that kind of thing. Compare job A to job B to job C.

Okay, so Boss A was a psychopathic megalomaniac, but gave good appraisals, and the view from the window was brilliant. Boss B was terrific, but the pay was miserable and the office was underground. Job C had some great perks, but Boss C managed to stifle every innovative suggestion. You get the idea.

Then you can imagine what would happen if Boss A and Boss C were to meet each other in a fight to the death with only staplers as weapons.

A day after I started my current job, I was not a happy camper. A cramped desk, in the middle of the main office thoroughfare. No working phone. Only barely acceptable shops within walking distance. And… gasp No e-mail or Web access at work. Shock! Horror!!

But to my surprise, this is turning into the most enjoyable job in a long time. Why? For a start, I’m hailed as the guru in my particular area of expertise. I think I’m going to ask them to build a kind of temple for me in the corner, where they can bring offerings for my advice.

I’m also getting to try things I’ve only hitherto dabbled in. Which means I’m learning lots. It’s good to keep the ol’ grey matter ticking over, you know. If not thoroughly exercised, the brain starts to get kind of rubbery, and you begin lose your ability to umm… concen… whatsername. It’s good to keep the ol’ grey matter ticking over, you know.

So anyhow, now I’m a happy camper after all.

It must be a curious phenomenon of the responsible newly licensed driver: I want to get breathalised. It’s not that I want to triumphantly avoid giving the cops a single chance to take my newly earned licence away by finding alcohol in my blood. It’s just part of the whole car experience, like driving over the Westgate Bridge for the first time, or doing the Great Ocean Road, or parallel parking in a busy street.

Or changing a tyre, I suppose. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that quite so much.

But while I’ve done most of the above, I haven’t been pulled over once. I don’t think I’ve even got any stern looks from passing police. I guess I’m successful at trying not to drive like a complete maniac.

So anyway, here’s what happened last Thursday week. I had left the car at Susannah’s (my sister) place in Richmond, and we’d gone to the Paul Kelly concert on the tram. After getting back around midnight, and a quick go on John’s (my sister’s boyfriend) cool but extremely bizarre handheld electronic angling game (I kid you not!) I got back in the car and headed for home.

I thought I knew a shortcut, which involved turning right from Swan Street into Church Street. But when I got there, I noticed a big "No Right Turn" sign. Despite it being past midnight, and there being almost nobody around, I thought I’d be a good citizen, and besides, taking Glenferrie Road south would be just as easy.

My sister told me later that there used to be a second piece of that sign, that said something like "MON-FRI 4:30-6:30pm", which has fallen off, and nobody knows if they mean to replace it or not.

But no matter. A further kilometre or so down Swan Street, a police car turned into the street ahead, going in the same direction. And a few seconds, I saw a second police car, stopped with the lights flashing, with some motorist getting a quizzing. Didn’t look too serious though. The Vic police can look pretty friendly when they don’t have their guns drawn.

At this point, the road goes up and over the rail lines at Burnley. And just beyond the bridge, in the perfect concealed location, there it was: a booze bus. Cops walking around, bollards out, warning signs telling me to slow down… the whole circus. Yippee!

I slowed down. This could be it. Breathe into the bag time. This is Lucky Phil time. At last. Beyond the bus, I could see a car, apparently chased and stopped in a side street by another police car in an apparent escape attempt.

My car approached the bus… I slowed down… Looking expectantly for a signal to stop… They were packing up. Damn!

Ah well, maybe next time.

Junk mail

Within two days of me writing all about the Who’s Who thingy, and their associated US$951 membership fee, well knock me down with a bulldozer, but what should arrive in the (analogue) mail? A letter from them again! Exactly the same as the first one, but with a later date! I guess I’m back to step one.

I’m never going to escape, am I. It’s like being on a Reader’s Digest list. They’ll keep sending me stuff for decades, all promising great stuff if I just acknowledge them by sending something back. I’ll have to fake my own death to get off their mailing list.

Since this terrific offer is here in front of me once more, here are some choice quotes:

"Dear Daniel Bowen" - ah yes, number one sign of a mail merge. All they’ve got is my name and address. No "Dear Daniel", no "Dear Mr Bowen", nothing like that, because their computer doesn’t know if I’m a Mr or a Ms or what. Later, there’s "Specifically, Daniel Bowen, …." Just thank God they don’t have it clumsily printed like Reader’s Digest do, with the line including my name in it done in a different font.

"As a highly respected professional in your field…" - of course, they have no idea what my field is, apart from the fact that they’ve already sent me one of these forms which I was foolish enough to send back last time.

"PS." - wait for this one… "There is no cost or obligation on your part for your inclusion in the International Who’s Who directory". Ha! (See 10/5/98).

And well well well, they even have a Web page. www.gibralter.com. Obviously they couldn’t get a domain name remotely related to their company name. But hey, apparently Ivana Trump is on the Board Of Advisors!

Thursday

On Thursday at work I met and worked with a thoroughly nice Scottish bloke for a few hours. His surname is pronounced Coe-burn, but it’s spelt Cockburn, something which I was thankfully forewarned about. You wouldn’t want to be handed a business card and blurt out your presumed pronounciation before being told.

We got on like a house on fire, and by the end of the afternoon, were about ready to start up a mutual appreciation society. In some ways it’s nice working in a place where nobody else knows much about what you do, because you get to be hailed as an exhaulted guru, but it’s also nice to once in a while come across somebody who’s on exactly the same wavelength.

The Paul Kelly concert on Thursday night was awesome, as one would expect. And just so there’s no confusion, no, it’s not the footballer, or the political journalist. Who’d have thought there would be three famous people with the same name?

This PK is definitely the most musical of the three, and I’m determined now to get his latest album. The only reason I haven’t yet is that I’m waiting to see if L won it by subscribing to HQ magazine. Maybe I should go on a spending spree and stock up on his back catalogue instead.

Birthday

Isaac’s third birthday was on Friday, and on Sunday we had his birthday party. We took over one of the local parks, flooding it with Isaac’s friends.

Isaac had told everyone who would listen, in his none too subtle way, that he wanted extra track for his Lego Duplo train set. And by golly, some people did listen. He ended up with about half a dozen boxes of the stuff, and he now has a train network that dominates the livingroom. Ah, takes me back to my own childhood.

Thankfully, some people got him other stuff - including his parents (of which I am one) who got him a bike. Now, if I can just explain to him what the significance of the pedals are.

Yay, only 3 sleeps until the Paul Kelly concert! I’m seriously looking forward to this one. At last I seem to have found a musician who not only plays music I enjoy listening to, but writes songs I can really identify with. There’s a lot of music that I like, but most of it seems to involve really great music with lyrics that I can’t understand, or if I understand what the words are, I certainly don’t understand what the words mean.

Networking - the people kind, not the computer kind - can be a real pain. I should point out here that I’m not going to offer you shares in some company you’ve never heard of. I’m not going to invite you to join in a pyramid scheme. And I’m not going to ask you to become an agent in your local area for some crap product that I claim has performed miracles for me. Honest.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the type of networking I really don’t like is when somebody is trying to make money directly out of doing it. The type of networking that sees Amway reps pulling you into a corner and offering you a "great business opportunity", and another variety is those endless spam e-mails, most of which seem to involve bloody Karen Liddell, the 35 year old mom, wife and part-time accountant with a great pyramid scheme for you to join.

Another one I got earlier this year was a letter through the mail from somewhere in the US, addressed to me personally, and asking politely if I wanted to be included in a Who’s Who list of the computer industry. I wondered where they got my name and address, something I still don’t know. But it said that all I had to do was fill in my details and send it back, and I could get listed. So I thought "what the hell", filled it in and sent it back, and then forgot about it.

A couple of months later, there was a phone call. An American voice was on the other end, explaining that Who’s Who wanted to make an appointment to do a telephone interview to work out if I qualified to be in their guide. After she’d finished struggling to get the concept of what timezone I was in, we made an appointment for the following day. I made a note of it in my diary, and then forgot about it.

The next day, the phone rang, and sure enough it was Whatsername, the woman they’d said would call. She asked questions about what I do and what I was planning to do in the computer industry - mostly the sort of questions that were answered on the original form anyway. She then did a telephonic song and dance about how marvellous their Who’s Who is, and what great networking opportunities it offers for those privileged and very special people who managed to crawl their ways into it.

By this point, I was getting a very bad feeling about this. It wasn’t helped when she said that I had indeed been judged one of those privileged and very special people who could get into the guide, and, as if it was a Nobel Prize For Computing, offered her congratulations.

Then she went on to explain what you get with membership into Who’s Who - and by the time she’d talked about the special book of annointed people and the plaque to put on the wall, it had clicked. These people were not getting the smartarses of the computing world together out of the goodness of their hearts. All this wanky plaque and book stuff was going to cost some serious moula.

Sure enough: "The basic membership costs $951…" So at that point, I brought the conversation to an emergency stop, trying (barely successfully) to find the good nature to be polite about my reasons for not wanting to shell out something over $1400 (’cos you can bet she was quoting US dollars) for a glorified hyperlink.

We hung up and then I forgot about it. Though thinking about it now, I wonder - does the Real Who’s Who have some sort of trademark protection? ‘Cos if it was me, I’d be suing these guys’ arses off.

But now to the good news. Almost a year ago, one of my diary entries (30/5/97) rabbitted on about the possibilities of setting up an equivalent of the Kevin Bacon Game database for ordinary (ie non-movie star) people, to see if the links between different people could be worked out.

With a little help from a friend, I’ve discovered that somebody’s done it: it’s at www.sixdegrees.com. Okay, so they do make money off advertising on the web pages, but that’s fair enough. And they’ve actually done quite a good job of it. So, anybody reading this, jump to their page and tap your details in. Feel free to put a link to me as an acquaintance or a business contact or friend or something. They don’t have to know the truth!

People who follow my diary regularly may be wondering why the entries in the last few weeks have been so few and far between. I’ve been wondering why too, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that my life is not as funny now as it sometimes has been. That’s not to say I’m not having a good time, or not laughing and joking with my friends on a regular basis (like when we watched The Life Of Brian on Good Friday again this year).

Perhaps being now in a reasonably sensible job (lack of e-mail aside) I’m just not suffering enough? Next time do I need to take a crap job, and in any other way I can find, increase my suffering in the name of comedy?

I write this diary primarily for amusement. Yours and mine. It’s not so much a record of my life as a chance for me to describe some of the things that happen to me in a highly amusing manner. At least, I write it hoping it will be highly amusing. Sometimes it doesn’t turn out that way.

So what have I been up to? Not quite the things I’ve planned to be up to, that’s for sure. At the start of April, when I knew I’d have a couple of weeks off work for recreation and general lazing, I wrote a list of things to do. "To do - April ", I optimistically called it. It wasn’t too over the top. Not the kind of list that would have kept a taskforce of two dozen highly skilled workaholics busy for two years. Only about a dozen items, each of which would take between a few minutes and few hours to complete.

My theory was that if I had a list of things to do, each time I found myself with a little spare time, I could look at the list and do one or more of them. I’m sure that a few years ago when I used to write such a list, I’d find myself polishing it off without too much effort.

Well, it’s now the thirty-fourth of April, AKA the fourth of May, and I’m just now remembering that it never really did work after all. Then, as now, the items sit on the list. A couple of them get ticked off, and I get really ticked off because I never seem to get around to doing the others.

Now, maybe if I just cross out "April", and put "May"…