My lesson from Thursday night: when wearing a nice woven silk tie, don’t lean across a table with a rough edge for a protracted period of time. This course of action may well result in the little threads becoming broken, loose, or otherwise completely stuffed up.

Actually maybe not completely. It just looks a bit… well, wrinkled. At least from some angles. I’ll see if I can batter it about with an iron or something.

I’ve just finished reading The Year Of Living Dangerously. Yes it’s true, I’m not a particularly fast reader. That is, I don’t seem to have (or make) much time to read. Most of it’s confined to the trip to and from work, which is only about 15 minutes each way. And some of that on the way home is taken up by reading the trashy (but free)MX. So, it’s taken me a month or so to get through it.

What sparked me off reading the book - seeing the movie, and the character of Billy Kwan being based on my father - has faded somewhat as the story has weaved its way to the September 13th attempted coup. He was still there, but less prominent in the plot, and the rich characterisation which introduced his character has reduced.

It’s not Kwan’s beliefs (political and otherwise) which are based on dad, but rather his mannerisms. I’m happy to say that my dad doesn’t have the same strange fascination with dwarves that Kwan has — in fact my dad says this probably comes from Koch himself, who although not a dwarf, is a tad on the short side, and may have a bit of a hang-up about his height.

Anyway it remains an interesting read, especially as Hamilton walks head-long into the coup attempt. As I said when I started reading it, the themes are still very much present in the world today: the clashes between western and other cultures, the moral questions over poverty, and the involvement of journalists in the stories they cover. Definitely recommended.

Every once in a while I’ll read something that speaks volumes to me. This excerpt is from Ben Elton’s "Blast From The Past", which I’m reading at the moment:

Every golden generation, every fresh-faced group of friends, must statistically contain those who will fall prey to the sad clichés of life. The things they never thought would or could happen to them. Divorce, alcoholism, illness, failure. Those were things that happened to one’s parents’ generation. To adults who no longer had their whole lives before them. It comes as a shock when the truth dawns that every young person is just an older person waiting to happen, and it happens a lot sooner than anyone ever thinks.

I should note that I’m not feeling particularly down about being 32, divorced and single. But thinking about my life, and the people I grew up with, and where we all are now, it did strike me as ringing very, very true.

Went to see the keynote address of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last night, given by Bill Bryson. The man is hilarious. It made a great end to the working week to laugh my arse off at his speech. I’m getting an urge to read all his books again, and to check my collection to make absolutely sure I haven’t missed any. Of course, having said that, I have no idea where I’ll find the time to do so.

Meanwhile, a few people I know have now seen my video destruction clip. A few people have suggested I send it into Australia’s Funniest Home videos - not a show I usually watch, but I think I’ll take a look tonight to note down the address for tape submissions!

I’ve been keeping an eye on the snow reports. I’m hoping to take the kids for a day trip to the snow at Mt Donna Buang tomorrow. It’s been cold all week, so it should be good. Chuck a few snowballs around, maybe make a snowman, go tobogganing - all good fun.

I hit pay dirt at the library on Sunday. Earlier in the year I’d been looking for a book… not a book essential to my work or way of life, but a book I was reasonably keen to borrow and read. It was out and overdue. So I bided my time, I waited for it to be returned, keeping an eye on its status via the library’s catalogue on the Web.

The very fact that I can check my local library catalogue on the Web is a marvellous thing. Scott Adams once wrote a highly amusing essay arguing that life won’t be like Star Trek… in a lot of ways he’s right, but I think in its own way, the Web fulfils just a little bit of the future as predicted by Star Trek and countless other sci-fi shows. Do you remember when someone would hook into the databases of a far away computer for information? Most people probably never thought very much about it, but at the time this was the stuff of fantasy.

Well, now you can do it. Information from all over the world is accessible to anybody anytime through the web. And when I say anyone, I mean anyone with the requisite software and network connection, obviously - - there’s parts of the world where people barely have enough food to get through the day without starving to death, let alone any sort of computer equipment. And when I say anytime, I mean anytime that your computer, your network connection, the computer you’re trying to reach, and all the computers and network connections in between the two of you, are working perfectly.

So, yes, thanks to the wired people at Glen Eira Council, I kept an eye on the book from their catalogue on the web. And eventually the book was returned. I strolled into Caulfield Library a few days later to look for it and… couldn’t find it. It wasn’t there. The catalogue said it was, but it wasn’t. A librarian helped me look, and couldn’t find it either. He said it had probably been mis-filed, and marked it as lost in the catalogue. Damn.

Months passed, and I happened to be back in the library last Sunday. I idly wandered to the shelf where the missing book should have been located. And there is was. I snatched it, dug through my wallet for my library card and went to borrow it.

The librarian wrestled with his computer, but couldn’t find it in the catalogue. It had vanished. He called over a colleague, and they studied the screen intently. He asked if he should enter it back into the system. The colleague picked up the book and inspected its aging spine. Then, perhaps with paperwork-minimisation in mind, she turned to me and said “would you like to buy it for a dollar?”

I’d been waiting months for this book. It would have cost me $2 to reserve it. “Yes!” I replied.

And the deal was done. They had to find a “Withdrawn from Glen Eira Library Service” stamp, but since it was already missing from the catalogue, that’s all they had to do, apart from take my dollar and rub it on the alarm neutralising magnetic thingy. So the book is mine. Woo hoo!

Left the car at home today. Getting on the tram with me this morning were about a dozen schoolgirls wearing black jeans, decorated black t-shirts, and all carrying a wide variety of scary-looking (yet brightly coloured) water guns.

They chattered away like schoolgirls, but adopted the pose of Special Operations Group cops, pointing their guns in the air for safety, lest their fellow terrified tram passengers get accidentally doused in water.

Ah, the joys of the last day of high school… hope they got at least a few teachers on their rampage.

Catching the tram/train to work occasionally lets me catch up on my reading. At the moment it’s Bill Bryson’s "A Walk In The Woods", and as it happens he’s in town, promoting his next book, and letting people know that he’ll be around in January preparing to write a book about our fine country. I wonder if he’ll bring Katz with him… Hopefully he won’t get splashed by any rampaging schoolgirls with water guns.

As I write this, the French are detonating nuclear bombs in the Pacific. And so, this week’s moron of the week is Jacques Chirac, who has defied world opinion and common sense, and gone ahead with the first of the new series of French nuclear tests. Why? Well, no-one’s really sure.

Actually, today we saw some demonstrators outside the French consulate here in Melbourne. Yep, the full bit. The white plastic suits, the banners, the street theatre, the conga lines, the flannelette shirts, everything. Some shouting, waving banners, and generally blocking up the street outside. After about half an hour the crowd started to disperse, so I figured either the French announced a change of heart… or the people got tired. The latter, I think.

This Helen Dimidenko/Darville case has got me wondering. Think football. Robert Dipierdeminico(*) - is that HIS real name?? Is the "Big Dipper" actually Bob Darville from Yorkshire?

(*)Or however you spell it.

This is a plea to any of my relatives who may be reading. (Actually, not many of my relatives do read this drivel, meaning that my standing in the family as a "fine upstanding young man with a promising career etc etc" has not yet been completely shattered. Give it time.)

Don’t give me any more novels to read. The backlog is getting embarrassing. They pile up in the bookshelf… Okay, I admit it, I’m not a great reader. I’ve never been a great reader. In school, it may have looked like I was reading "1984", but to tell the truth, I never got past the first sentence. The one about clocks. "Animal Farm" — no problem. Appealed to my love of small furry animals, probably. (I still deny any accusations of cruelty to these particular creatures. There is no substantial evidence.)

It’s not that I can’t read. I’ve read for many years. It’s just that I have a belief in only reading things that can keep me interested. If a book doesn’t have one even mildly interesting thing on each page, then chances are I won’t be bothered. It’s not like music, which you can just turn on and listen to without too much bother. You can leave it going in the background. Books are effort.

Maybe I just don’t have enough patience. I just can’t be bothered to read through 250 pages of narrative to discover that the butler did it. Maybe I’m too much a part of the TV generation. Maybe the whole plot has to be given to me on a 19 inch black-tinted plate with stereo sound. And commercial breaks every five pages.