I just saw the oddest thing in MacGowan Avenue. A bloke drove up, got out of his car, had a slash against a tree, then went into the house.

Why would you do this? If it’s your house, you should be able to use your own toilet. If it’s not your house, is anybody really going to be so embarrassed that they can’t ask to use the toilet? That is, more embarrassed than they would be if they are spotted out on the street pissing on a tree instead?

Compensation for it all… The League Of Gentlemen

A few minorly crap things happened during the week.

Someone sent spam with my address forged as the sender. Wonderful stuff, something I’d like to personally thank the sender for - perhaps with a cricket bat. The spam itself was a pretty heavily encoded ad for a porn site, and the only reason I know about it was that some of the intended addressees don’t exist, and I got to see the bounces. Thankfully nobody has come whinging to me about having sent it.

Wednesday was meant to be D-Day - the court
hearing for my divorce was scheduled. But my ex was very sick early in the week, so it had to be postponed. Fair enough, it’ll happen when it happens.

Also on Wednesday I got my Visa bill - and noticed two transactions from May that I don’t recognise, adding up to about $200. In both cases they looked like legitimate companies, but neither of them were ones I have ever dealt with. Very dodgy. I filled out the appropriate forms at the bank, and hope to hear soon what they find out.

My wonderful cable ISP has announced that from sometime next month, a new traffic cap of 3 gigabytes per month will apply. Funny, ‘cos I’m sure this started out as a plan with no traffic limits whatsoever. Understandably, a number of people, even those who don’t use this much traffic, are somewhat miffed by the prospect.

My favourite TV show that’s on air at the moment, Good Guys Bad Guys, was pre-empted this week because of tennis.

And finally, some rejigging of the server that I use to send the Toxic Custard mails from has resulted in some bouncing messages that were previously flying off somewhere into the ether, finally coming to me. 140 of them, to be precise. 140 people have suddenly fallen off the mailing list. D’oh!

Funny, I’m remarkably cheerful considering all this happened in one week! Must be because my League Of Gentlemen DVD arrived. It’s brilliant - even more brilliant than when I saw it on telly, thanks to the extra bits on the DVD. The commentary by the actors/writers is particularly good - it sounds like the four of them just sat around a microphone, watching their show and explaining/taking the piss out of it/each other. Hilarious stuff.

I just went ten pin bowling for the first time, down at theAMF thingy in Moorabbin.

First Nat and I coughed up our dosh and got the funny shoes on, then we went and found our lane. She gave me a quick introduction and demonstration, then I tried it. The first couple of times I hit absolutely nothing, but then I got into the swing of things, and by the end of the… umm… is it a game? A round? A set? I don’t know. Anyway by the end of it, I had scored an apparently reasonably acceptable 118.

(Postscript 17/6/2001: I should note at this point that Nat has demanded I mention that she scored 176. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Nat for not including this information before, to say how brilliant she is at bowling, and to say that I sincerely hope she doesn’t hit me.)

Bowling is, I think, one of those games which is quite suited to someone like me who is just about half blind, and so has limited depth perception. A complete contrast to, say, badminton, which I am absolutely crap at.

We played three thingies, and by that point, our arms were worn out and we were in danger of getting RSI. Our scores suffered as well - second time around I got 115, then hit a low of 86. But no matter - it was a helluva lot of fun.

Cover from MX - 4/6/2001

Tonight on the way home I picked up a copy of MX
at the station. I glanced at the headline, and thought to myself "Zebra dead? - oh dear, that’s bad news for the zoo".

Then I read it again: "Zorba dead" - Anthony Quinn died today. I wonder if the Zorbas chain of Greek restaurants are in mourning? I seem to remember their Richmond branch has loads of pictures from the movie.

I can’t believe I’ve written this much about the death of an actor I know almost nothing about.

(This entry was written retrospectively, on 20 June 2001)

Three and a half days a week, I live without a car. It basically goes where the kids go, for logistical reasons, unless I really need it. Sometimes I worry that the kids will turn into lazy chauffeur driven teenagers, but I have schemes to counter that.

Where I live, it’s actually not half bad living without a car. I made sure of that when I moved here. It’s kind of just outside the hip inner suburbs, and it almost gives me the ability to do my impression of the groovy car-free (and care-free) inner-city bachelor. Oi, stop laughing.

What I mean is, it’s nice to be able to not worry about the big chunk of metal - where I’m gonna park it, have I locked it properly, does it need more petrol. It’s a reminder of my life before I had a car. Where all I needed was my monthly ticket, and I could go anywhere. Reality is not quite that rosy of course, but it still has its appeal.

So today I ventured into suburbia, where the whole theory falls down. Out east, they’ve got real transport problems. In the leafy suburbs like Rowville and Knox, they’ve got virtually no public transport: no trams, no trains, most of the buses are hourly or non-existent on weekends… yet apparently they’ve got some of the worst traffic in the city.

The Powers That Be reckon spending - oh, not much, only around a billion dollars - to put a freeway through the area is the answer, even though research seems to suggest most of the traffic is people making local trips, which wouldn’t be solved by a freeway anyway. Add to this the fact that the Environmental Effects Study on transport in the area was cobbled so it was unable to recommend major upgrades to public transport only, and you start to get the feeling that The Powers That Be are run by a bunch of guys with no interests other than Paving The Planet.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I use freeways. But hell, they are ugly, noisy bloody things. I remember Gardiner’s Creek before the South Eastern freeway was built. Gardiner’s Creek wasn’t fantastic, but it was a little bit of nature intruding into suburbia. In theory the creek’s still there somewhere, but with huge amounts of grey concrete dominating the scene, and cars and trucks roaring past 24 hours a day, the ambience certainly isn’t what it was.

So, like I say, I ventured into suburbia. As a loyal member of the Public Transport Users’ Association, I was deemed to be a prime candidate for dropping propaganda in people’s letter boxes. Thankfully the weather was nice, and it was certainly some good exercise - both physically, and mentally, as trying to remember which of the streets had been done and which hadn’t was quite a challenge.

The joys of the BAS

I had one of the most frantic mornings in quite some time (involving trying to get into work by 9:30, with the kids unexpectedly at my place and one of them sleeping in an hour late)… and then, once I had got to work, something terrifying… something that brings fear into the hearts of men…

A call from the Australian Tax Office.

Well, a voicemail to be precise - they rang while I was in a meeting. The voicemail was a very polite, non-confrontational woman called Maria, asking me to ring back about my March BAS.

Uh oh. Quite frankly, I was shitting myself. What could they want? It’s not like I try to pull any strokes as far as my tax goes. But the thought of them rifling through my company accounts then demanding a huge payment for the privilege terrified me.

I looked at my phone. Since I got the data cable for it last week, I’ve been playing with things such as putting custom logos and stuff on it. What I have on it now is "Don’t Panic!", written in large friendly letters on the display. Several times it has been genuinely useful for me to read those words. It’s especially handy when I look at the clock on the phone to see if I’m running late for something.

I read these words, and calmed down. And phoned. The cheerful guy at the ATO muddled his way through his computer records and eventually found the problem - I had forgotten to add up a number on the BAS, and had therefore deprived the nation of $170. Phew. So that was all. I breathed a sigh of relief.

In the evening I forgot all my worries as a whole bunch of Goodies
fans came over to watch a few hours of old Goodies episodes. I laughed until my jaw hurt. Even something you’ve seen 20 times before is brilliantly funny when there’s a bunch of others laughing along with you.