Since Sunday morning I have

• Tidied up the house post-party.
• Renewed my library copy of To The Lighthouse for a few more weeks so I can try and finish it.
• Bought a CD (Corduroy), a jacket (not corduroy) and a bunch of groceries.
• Managed to pay the bills before they became overdue.
• Including the Visa bill, which won’t know what hit it when the jacket gets added onto it.
• Wondered what it takes to convince the gas company that I am no longer married, as three years later they still send bills with mine and my ex-wife’s names on them.
• Turned 33.
• My birthday started off not going quite to plan when on the way to work (yes, I had to work) I missed one train, and the next one was 20 minutes late. Thankfully things improved after that.
• Ate copious amounts of chocolate and biscuits given to me for my birthday.
• Went past and emptied the mailbox at my old place, then wrote "Not known at this address" on 14 items. Haven’t summoned up the energy to haul them all down the street to re-post them yet.
• Told an ex-girlfriend who left Australia more than two years ago about the letter there that was for her - from the phone company telling her they owe her $9. Zowee.
• Failed to tidy my study computer roomy thing. I think it will forever be messy.
• Wondered if this media thing will be this full-on every week. Appeared on TV once, radio twice, and got quoted in the Herald Sun twiceand The Age once.
• Pondered if having a minor media profile will help my resume at all - or at least help me meet girls!
• In recent years my mate Phil and I have had a kind of informal competition going to see how many letters we could get into the newspaper. I think I may have blown him out of the water this week.
• I think that’s the last I’ll mention the media thing for a while. I’m rather worried about my ego developing hot-air-balloon-like qualities and floating away through the clouds.
• I Discovered I quite like Six Feet Under.
• Noted there are still a number of people I haven’t notified that I’ve moved, even though it was over a month ago.
• On the only clear night this week, looked at Mars, alas without the benefit of binoculars or a telescope, which meant it just looked like a brighter dot than any of the other dots in the sky. Impressive nonetheless. I might eat a Mars Bar to celebrate.
• Somehow remembered to put the rubbish and recycling bins out on the right day. Wondering if the bottle recyclers will scan and detect the errant blue M&M in one beer bottle that Tony left there.
• Threatened my alarm clock with replacement because the most important button - Snooze - isn’t working properly.

10:15am. Well I’m quoted in the
Hun today (page 1 no less - why do things by half?), and in about an hourABC TV want to talk to me. Which scares the crap out of me to be honest.

11:50am. That wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I thought it might be. I’m quite looking forward to seeing how I look in my new jacket. After all, why use a mirror when you can see yourself on TV? I hope my tie was straight and that my blind eye wasn’t wandering around too much making me looked deranged.

8pm. Well that wasn’t too bad. I looked relatively sane. My 9 second comment was taken slightly out of context, but ah well, what can you do.

I probably shouldn’t be making such a song and dance about this, but it’s the first time in ages I’ve been on the telly.

It must be a spending spree week. I’ll use the excuse of giving myself a birthday treat. At lunchtime I went and bought a new work jacket to finally retire the last of my old scruffy horrible ones. Wool and cashmere and something else. Lovely. Probably a disgustingly opulent waste of money while people are starving on the planet, but it was on sale, so not as pricey as it could have been. Damn this penchant for expensive clothing I seem to have developed.

Why are these called sports jackets even though they’re worn to work, not sport? Whatever. I don’t wear suits. Never really liked them for some reason. Maybe it’s because the only suit I’ve owned was cheap and nasty.

Now, if only my weekend clothes were up to such a high standard.

CD review: Ocean Colour Scene "North Atlantic Drift"

When I was out on Saturday trying to hunt down aCorduroy CD (any Corduroy CD, please - I crave listening to their frantic fast paced acid jazz without the piracy stigma and quality loss of MP3) I happened upon OCS’s latest. I’d seen it the day before in the city, but in one of those horrible cardboard CD cover things I dislike so much. Don’t they know the conventional CD case is more convenient and longer-lasting?

So when I saw a copy of it in a conventional case, I snapped it up. Not so much Britpop as Britrock, it starts off fast and loud and romps along through eleven tracks - some soft almost-acoustic numbers, and some like the opening track which would definitely benefit from an amp which went up to eleven.

Track 3, the title track sounded strangely familiar, like I’d heard it on the radio or something. Surely not, these guys are almost unheard of here aren’t they? Apart from their track on the Lock Stock movie soundtrack. Or maybe Triple J had found them.

But no, it was because I’d heard an acoustic version from their excellent (and very obscure) "Live on the Riverboat" CD - which came in a very cool but totally impractical plastic cover with simulated blue river water inside it. Like some of their previous songs, it seems to have a subtle political message - something easily lost through simply enjoying the music. This one appears to reference something very topical the relationship of Britain to the USA, both in political and cultural terms. Some of the other lyrics on the album appear somewhat deeper and will require more investigation.

No doubt it’s not to everyone’s tastes, but I found it a most enjoyable CD - so did some of the party people apparently. And the first one in ages I’ve played repeatedly since buying it.

Ponderings from the weekend:

• My party strategy might have included getting the first arriving guest to help make the punch, so they don’t feel like standing around doing nothing. But the first two guests arrived together so instead some of the initial discussion was based around what should go into punch.
• Juice, some fruit and some strong cold tea seemed to work.
• Did I really spend $85 buying party nibbles? Other stuff bought simultaneously must have contributed. Still, either my guests were going to be very well-fed, or there was going to be a shitload of stuff left over. It was the latter, with some stuff never making it out of the fridge (possibly due to lack of diligence on my part).
  

  Inside the recycling bin, the morning after

• Why when I went to SMS Josh to ask him to bring some paper plates over (because I foolishly had only one packet) did the predictive text on my mobile initially suggest I wanted "slaves" instead of "plates"? Is the average SMS user more likely to be talking about slaves than plates? How would he have reacted if asked to bring some slaves over?
• Not that it mattered, as my supply of plates was enough.
• I spent hours last week trying to find a cool CD that I wanted so I could play it during the party. Nobody seemed to have it. I ended up finding it the next day.
• Not that it mattered, as everyone congregated in the kitchen and outside the back door, whereas the music was relegated to way back in the background from the other end of the house.
• And to think I spent all that time tidying up the livingroom, too!
• By my count about two thirds of the people who came have web sites. It’s a scary, scary world out there.
• Everyone seemed to have a good time, even though things were winding down only shortly after midnight. If one can judge a party by the standard of the recycling bin afterwards, it went okay.
• The day after, it was very tempting to just spend all day eating party food leftovers. ‘Cos it’d be wrong not to eat it all while there are people starving in the world, right?

And just a couple of other random thoughts which don’t relate specifically to this weekend:

• When did Kookai bags become a fashion accessory?
• Does McDonalds Australia putting "Australian owned and operated" notices on their franchise store doors really convince anybody?

Australia’s first flash mob (pic: F2)

About an hour after it happened I heard that Australia’s first flash mob event occurred outside Flinders Street Station during the rush hour last night. I suppose that means I’m just an hour behind the times.

To me it’s an appealing idea. I like the sense of absurdity and surprise which it must generate, though the mass media taking an interest undermines that somewhat. While the actions performed by the participants are pretty much meaningless, in its own way, it is public art, just like the more conventional street art dotted around the CBD. It’s another sign of Melbourne being a vibrant city.

Wednesday night was the blogger meetup - quieter than usual, in more ways than one. But at least in a quiet venue I could (mostly) hear what others were saying. A few drinks and a small but friendly crowd, which came to a slightly abrupt end when the bar closed.

Normally I switch off my mobile phone at night, to avoid being woken up by errant callers. I suppose I could switch it to silent, but I might as well save battery power. So last night I switched it off as I went to bed.

This morning I woke up and while munching on some breakfast and reading the morning’s e-mail, turned the phone back on. It beeped to tell me I had a voicemail. I rang the voicemail number and the nice Ms Recorded Voice Lady told me there had been a call at 12:38am, and proceeded to play me the message. The message wasn’t so much a message as such, but more of the recording of two people chatting away, oblivious to the fact that their phone has called mine.

It went on for at least a few minutes - I haven’t had time to listen to all of it yet, and may not get around to it, as the first little bit wasn’t exactly riveting. The voices sound suspiciously like those of my sister and her husband, so hopefully it didn’t record half an hour’s worth of them chatting away in their kitchen in London, ‘cos that could add up to a sizeable phone bill.

Was it them? Could I be sure? You know what I was thinking, don’t you. Of course you do. I was thinking: "How can I blog this?"

I grabbed the computer microphone, stuck it next to the phone and played the voicemail back into it. Converted it to MP3 to post here, so you could all hear it and try and work out who it was.

My plan was foiled when I asked my sister if she’d accidentally called me, and she said "Must have, you’re in my calls list!" So the culprit has been found.

The housewarming party is on Saturday, so I expect I’ll be spending much of the next 48 hours tidying like a maniac. You’ll be pleased to know thatI’ve stopped panicking. Actually I never really did panic very much - it was just a bit of flowery writing.

This picture taken Wednesday morning, when it was even colder, and the ice much more obvious.

I didn’t fully appreciate how cold it was overnight until I got into the car this morning and noticed a strange pattern on the windscreen. "Ooh, interesting pattern", I remarked to the kids, before in my innocence I turned on the wiper to get rid of it so I could see properly. The wiper blade skidded across it, leaving it unscathed.

Ice. Ice on the windscreen. I don’t know how common that is in Melbourne, but it hasn’t happened to me before. Proof, if it was needed, that it’s not just that my house isn’t very well insulated (one visitor last week described it as an icebox) but it’s in rather a cold location. Half a bucket of H₂O thrown over the windscreen dispatched the ice to a watery grave. (I’ve wanted to use that expression for ages).

Meanwhile I got the second SMS spam I’ve had in recent weeks. I rang the people up, and it turns out they’ve got my number from "Oz On Disc", which is evidently a listing on a CD gathered from theWhite Pages. I made the mistake of listing my mobile number in the White Pages at one stage. I certainly regret it now. Vicious data gathering marketing bastards.

The bloke on the phone reckoned I was fair game because the number was listed there. Hmmm. Reading up on the Australian Communications Authority web site after talking to him, this appears to break the new
SMS spam guidelines, which are strictly opt-in. I’ll be looking into this further.

Meanwhile Mr Speakerphone’s successor’s minions have been using his office for speakerphone calls. I’m happy to say that after a little prompting, they’ve been extremely courteous and compliant about shutting the door while they conduct their booming conversations which I have no interest in hearing.

I must have looked out of place. I must have looked like a tourist, looking around with too much curiosity. Yesterday afternoon I was in Springvale, a long way from my usual neighbourhood. I was approaching the bus stop for Nunawading, walking slowly towards it, looking up at the funky (and not quite working) electronic sign saying when the bus was due. A nondescript man listening to a walkman was walking slowly past, staring at me. I ignored him and kept walking, and stood, waiting at the bus stop.

A voice behind me muttered something. I looked around to see the nondescript man had sauntered past me again. Nobody else could have said it.  He had said it like some of the announcements you hear on public transport - so indistinct you can only understand it if you already know what has been said. In the period while my brain was interpreting what it was, and its possible meanings, I almost said "What?" back. Then I worked it out. He’d said "Chasin’?"

Ask a Melburnian, and he or she will tell you that there are two Springvale clichés: Vietnamese people and shops (many of which I could see on the street around me) and heroin dealers. I had just encountered one of the latter.

I had heard that "Chasin’?" is what they say.Chasing the dragon. In fact a friend of a friend (I don’t even remember which friend) whose name is Jason, told the story of walking down a street somewhere, and being asked in a similarly indistinct way, "You chasin’?" He thought he’d been asked "You Jason?", so he replied, in a loud steady voice "Yes, I’m Jason". And for a minute there was much confusion.

I looked at the nondescript man. He had walked on a few metres, then looked around, avoiding my gaze, as if to surreptitiously work out if I was interested. I looked away. He turned and kept on walking away.

While I waited a few more minutes for the bus, I saw him stroll back again, ignoring me this time. He’d given all the signs he would give. The bus arrived, I boarded, and as it drove away, I saw him coming back down the street again.

It’s probably happened to me half a dozen times but I never noticed it before.

Later in the day on a tram I saw a woman (with a baby) who was the spitting image of a girl I had a crush on in high school. It brought memories flooding back. Now I wish I’d had the courage to go up and ask if it was her.

• September 1998: My encounter with the Amsterdam drug trade