It Sounds Yummy, I Think

There's an art to spacing your letters. It's called kerning and is often spoken about in the relationship between two letters, or kern pairs. (It's got nothing to do with an old Scottish couple pulling faces. That's gurn pairs.)

It's the art of moving the type in and out from each other to make the font look good, or "have good colour". It's the opposite of having a rigidly set and unchanging distance between every letter. I don't know much more about it other than the following.

A normal quality font will have between 200 and 500 pre-built kern pairs and a high quality font can have up to a thousand. I know that capital A and capital V should be drawn in together a bit if they're next to each other, and that 'Clint Eastwood' should never be capitalised, for fear of it being misread at a distance.

There's an ultimate form of mal-kerning at a set of lights near my place that always makes me smile. I'm not sure why, it's not even logical. In a hand-built sign, where the owner has put each letter on a seperate sheet of A4, he's gone a bit big with his 'O'. It really looks like you're staring in the window of a 'Factory Cutlet'.

It's an Easy Mistake to Make

I had a dream that I met a guy called Alexander Graham Poe, the inventor of the electric vampire. I remember thinking at the time "That will make a good plot for a sci-fi horror piece." When I woke up, I realised how silly it was. Alexander Graham Poe invented the electric raven, not vampire.

Miner Disturbance

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you – BASTARD!

If you don’t know what that bird is instantly, be grateful. It is a Noisy Miner and it isn’t a droll nickname, like being called ‘bluey’ when you're a red-head.

Not to be confused with the Indian Myna (who causes all sorts of problems for people in completely different ways) this one is an Australian native. You are therefore not allowed to trap them and do youth-in-asia on them.

First to the Myna that isn’t so much of a problem to me, the Indian Myna.

It’s the black and brown jobby with the yellow beak. A good mate has had his house made unliveable on occasion, by having hordes of them move into inaccessible parts of his roof. They build huge nests and then go about recolonising the rest of the house with their mites (and that’s not a fond colloquial term for their offspring. I really mean their parasites).

In a complicated manoeuvre involving a split level trap and a load of dog-food, he has managed to trap dozens and dozens of the mongrels. The trap comes with a canvas sleeve that fits over it. The sleeve has a built in hose that goes straight to the exhaust pipe of your car. Neat. Unless of course you have a brand new car that has the type of engine that puts out cleaner air than it takes in. No joke. He described pulling the canvas off the cage with a magician's flourish - to reveal 4 and twenty mynas, all fresh eyed and breathing deeply. Plan B, Borrow an old car.

My problem is with the intractable attention seeker, the Noisy Miner. (Strange that they should be spelt so differently too). I have been driven out of the house some afternoons by these things with their ceaseless ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma.

It is not a pleasant call. It is not a musical noise. It does not allow you to commune with nature. They don’t do it to a particular rhythm, they do it near, they do it far. They do it from dawn till dusk. They drive other birds out of the area because… well because other birds haven’t paid quite the same amount in real estate as I have and can just pick up and go. I would too if I only had to look for a branch with approximately the right circumference.

Knowing that I can’t do anything harmful or soul-releasing to these feathered fiends but wanting to move them on, I bought a truly extravagant water pistol. One of those ones that you can ‘over-pump’ to really build up a bit of pressure.

The result? Noisy Miners can hear me starting to pump the thing up, they fly just out of water pistol range, and then when they see that I have exhausted the water pressure in the thing, fly in and poo at me. They actually make aggressive little bombing runs at me now.

I can’t help but admire them a little.

Felt Like a Good Polling

I had a tiny little poll running over there (points right) and it has not helped at all. I suppose if I had made the questions more definitive and easier to follow, rather than just amusing myself, it might have turned out a little clearer. Hanging chads I done tells ya.

The question was whether I should move Fahrenheit 72 off the blog, because it sort of gums the thing up. Essentially, F72 needs to be a certain number of words, and I know that some of you enjoy it. But if you’re not interested, it can be off-putting scrolling, scrolling, scrolling to get to the shorter more easily digested frippery that I clutter the interweb with. Let’s face it. If it’s too hard, you link out and elsewhere and I’ve lost the audience.

The results show, that of the massive sample taken:

10% say ‘Yes’ move F72, but link from this page.

40% say ‘No’, don’t move it.

40% say ‘Go and own the Bird Flew Press domain and stick it there’, which in essence is a vote for a move, so 50% say “move it”.

10% say stop it all together you twit. Which I have to be able to cop on the chin. I have wandered into the semi-public domain and put it out there, so there’s always a chance the reaction is not going to be what you expected and you just have to man-up and take it. You just have to say to yourself “Well AGA, you were asking for it, and if you divide the troops a little on the way, well so be it, it just shows that you are doing something right…maybe.” You just have to remind yourself that in the early days of being a radio-host, people could be a little unkind if you didn’t meet their tiny-minded, fuck-arse expectations, but you eventually won them over, despite the fact that it cost a little of your soul to do so. You didn’t lose that much sleep over it, and all you have to do is 'keep on keeping on'. You don’t want to measure yourself by the knockers, that means the death of all fun and creative urges. It doesn’t worry you so much anymore. Years of counselling and drugs have made sure that the bile rises less. The funny blurry effect when you’re watching the television is not as frequent now. The crushing, personality-blow headaches don’t distract you from the task at hand (as you sit there on the long, lonely, cold nights in The Bomb, staking out dead-end after dead-end on the trail of Fruitnose) in anything other than the most lightly paralysing ways. No. You’re fine with it AGA; no probs. Angels fly because they take themselves lightly. Spruce up your wings little AGA. Clear up rainy face.

I have made a decision.

I will move Fahrenheit 72 off the blog. Eventually. (Hah. That showed ‘em) And I’m not going to stop the case either. Other pan-dimensional gum-shoes might give up at such fierce resistance, but not this agency, oh no siree. AGADA is on the case.

Like a Tourist From the Ashes

I had to send something to China recently and found it necessary to look at international shipping prices. (It was for Jana Rawlinson’s spare toe - I hope I’m not the only one amused that she called a press conference to apologise for being a drama queen.)

At short notice it was almost cheaper to send the Smurf in the seat with an overnight bag, and the goodies in the hold. (It was even cheaper per head to have me in the seat, the goodies in the hold and the Smurf in the overnight bag, but HR got onto me again about Occupational Smurf and Safety.)

In our research we came across another of those cultural divides that are continually cropping up as we close in on the Olympics. One of the best deals we found was from Air China, and it was for a “Phoenix Fare.” I have to make sure that Smurf has his flame retardant under-chunders on. He's going to have a great time.

Semi Detached is Not Just About Small Houses

Usually I feel pretty well connected to the world. I drive by the seat of my pants. I use the phone to make arrangements to see people in person. I eat too much at restaurants when I’m having fun. I buy music cds with money I earn at a job where I work with a team of friends and colleagues, where we work with actual stuff.

But!

I think the forces of Meh are trying to upload me. I dreamt last night that I was writing a blog read by strangers, in a Sims game. The game was being played in 3rd Life, which is a sub-reality of Second Life, which I was going into remotely through terminal services, using a wireless keyboard and monitor goggles with built in earphones.

At times like those, you can wake up with your personality in a glass by your bed and a zombie body going off to work for you.

Nursing Home Plight Worsens

"It has just been terrible," said Ida Lump, resident of the Seeping Pad Retirement Home.

"We've been overrun with stray popes. They come in here, and if they can't steal some of the gruel... they chew the table and try to lick the varnish off the sideboard. It's not like we've got a lot to start with."

This indignity was not enough it appears. Earlier in the week Ida and her fellow residents were evacuated for an emergency fumigation for a pilgrim infestation.

"It was quite strange," said Esther Estherhausen. "I'd be looking for the remote control, move the cushion, and there'd be hordes of the little buggers running for the shadows chanting 'Go Jesus'."

Normalcy and sense will be returned to the home as soon as the eradication is complete, promised a manager who preferred not to be named.

Three or Four Days of Night

You can't use the garlic at that range, it's not effective. It's stakes or silver bullets.

Dopey About Popey

Pope checks for gas leak at Sydney International Airport.











(Notes from the frontline of a new Crusade)

Papa's in town for those of you who don't live in Sydney. If you don't, you are being spared, and for that you should be thankful. Not get down on your knees, make pointy shapes with your hands, eternally thankful. Just for one temporal electoral period. I am going to reward my supposedly secular government for this gross travesty when it comes time.

Sydney's first question seems to be "why us?" I have heard it from so many people. Why us!? I thought this town was supposed to be Sodom and Gomorrah. I can't see that the Pope's arrival is going to help change anything. They've imported all these smugly righteous idiots, they don't seem to be the local variety. I hope and assume it's not a permanent demographic change.

Some footage from the airport is telling. Crowds of competing happy-clappys, all singing to prove to a not particularly clever god that you have to jam up an international airport's car park, if you want to appear truly faithful. I am absolutely certain I saw a Hare Krishna guy, pushing his way through the throng, rolling his eyes, and saying "I just wanna catch the fuckin' plane you dropkicks."

Still out at the airport, and even though I am reporting from S&G, I'm straight and therefore have not watched enough Sex and the City to be certain about this. But Pope baby, those shoes! They're fabulous. Manolo? Salvatore? Or just bespoke? I gotta know...

Some poor sod was caught by a microphone while being caught in a traffic jam in the CBD, "So what do you think of the visit so far?"

"Oh well, it's for a good cause I suppose," she answers. She's not certain, she's not giving way to anger and it's this sort of saintly like perseverance that shows how unfair Sydney's reputation for rudeness is. I know other parts of the world where they'd respond with rocket launchers to this sort of provocation.

Still it's good to know that when I march my special interest group through the centre of town (Grey Area celebrates the death of Big Brother), that I and my followers, will be met with mindless open-mindedness.

This one is a kicker. There is (I can barely type this for wanting to go and beat someone with a relic) a charity drive on at the moment for all the pilgrims who didn't bring enough clothes to weather a Sydney winter. Thousands upon thousands of these smug, drooling twits, have turned up and assumed that it would be just like home. Now I thought that they would have found it all cosy and warm; having their heads jammed so far up their arses like that.

Don't do it Sydney. You've been patient enough. Let the power of prayer warm them.

Two Loose Ends

In a nice little gathering together of the last two blogs, I get to reminisce about a time when the guy who told me the Pay TV story (two blogs ago) and I, took our girlfriends roller-blading in Centennial Park.

As a kid and teenager on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, I skated and surfed and rode all manner of wheeled things and became pretty blase about standing on unstable surfaces of any description. I remember going ice-skating once and didn't find it that difficult, so I hoped that I would get the hang of roller-blades pretty quickly.

As we were getting ready to leave, I said to my mate, in what I hoped would be an endearing sort of moment of personal revelation, "I hope that I am instantly good at this roller-blading game, otherwise I am going to lose interest pretty quickly."

He trumps my open and honest shallowness with, "I don't care how good I am as long as I'm better than you."

It Was Horrible, But I Kept Shooting

The carnage photographed earlier today by roving reporter, Grey Area.

Bystanders say they heard a terrible skidding noise and screaming, followed by a loud crash. A local resident Adnan Khashoggi said that he looked out of his living room window, to see a mushroom cloud of flame, and smoke. Debris from the accident has been found up to three meters away.

"It was like something out of the movies mate! It was fully sick. They was just coming down the hill, hand in hand like maniacs, and then the one on the left just loses it, and starts to plow into the other one like they was not there or nothing."

Residents in the area remain shocked at the accident. "Used to be that the hardest part about roller-blading was telling your parents you were gay" said a resident who does not want to be named.

Pay TV

One of my best mates relayed the following to me and it needs to be somewhere more secure than my head.

He used to work in the cut and thrust world of Sydney advertising. Knowing that, some of you will be able to imagine the vile type of office environment this story would have been told in.

Monday, and a lot of tired wrecks come in to compare weekend war stories. Having mistaken the reaction she usually elicits from people (horror, followed by nervous laughter) for bawdy camaraderie, the unpopular, profoundly unattractive loudmouth bully launches into another tale of failed romance.

The apprehension level in the room rockets up. What nausea-inducing detail of her existence are they going to be treated to now? How are they going to react with the appropriate level of sympathy when the first and warmest impulse is to run from the room screaming? How can they empathise with her on the mysteries of love, as her lurid pink mini-skirt rides up over the top of dimpled thighs?

Expecting everyone in the office to be interested, she bellows the details of the low-lit nightclub where she’s flirted with the guy for a couple of hours. They’re both drunk and she’s gonna take him home and jump his bones. She elaborates at top volume and gut churning detail about the groping during the darkened taxi ride back to the flat, the snogging and fondling in the unlit hallway and the falling into the apartment.

They make it in, still on the make. She lights the living room, turns to her latest conquest and tells him to make himself at home while she goes to freshen up and slip into something more comfortable. (Everybody at this stage is praying it’s a coma.)

Now, the guy must have sobered up a little in the cab, and then become fully aware of what he was in for.

Her gagging workmates hear how she exits the bathroom. Swishing the feather boa and doing her best to do a slinky walk without the noise from her thighs drowning out the mood music - she finds him gone and the front door swinging open.

She is not entirely surprised. This is not the first time that an intended fling has done a runner on her. She goes to the fridge, serves up a big bowl of chocky ice-cream and settles herself down on the couch to watch the end of Rage… to find that he has stolen her telly on the way out.

The tension in the office starts to crack like sea-ice in spring. Smiles start to spread like a fast summer dawn. The phrase "...stole her fuckin' telly!" starts to be repeated joyously around the room.

Now I don’t want to be prescriptive about the way you read the blog - but do just pause and think this over.

Is this the modus operandi of one of the least violent, but most hurtful home-invasion artist (you get to case the joint properly without having to break in)? Or is this the work of a truly heartless opportunist?

“Oh fuck me dead. She is a dead-set, ocean-going, copper-bottomed sea-cow. I can’t believe I got all those drinks and the cab. I have got to get out of this joint before she comes back from the… hey, that’s a nice telly… guess the night isn’t a total right-off.”

Either way, there's a bloke in his crucial dancing threads, standing on a street corner holding a television, trying to hail a cab. I just can't imagine a getaway car being involved.

Another Biggy Answered For You

If like me, you have wondered why you never see the hide of a hippopotamus stretched out before the log fire in the hunting retreat; like me, never seen the proud head of the hippo mounted alongside the fierce lion and tiger heads down at the Gentleman's Club; you have to as always return to the Ancient Greeks for the answer.

A square of hippopotamus is not equal to the bum or the hair of another two hides.

(Please address your complaints to the comments field provided below. Hawkers and canvassers will be prosecuted.)

Keep Taking Your Pills Please Plebs

It’s like working with a jumped-up Magna-Doodle. A fast Magna-Doodle to be sure, but still just a Magna-Doodle. (You know when you say a word so often it loses it’s meaning? Well that just happened then, with Magna-Doodle. Now I’m not sure if it’s a car, a dog, or type of high tech blackboard.)

I will explain. My workmate, Smurf, and I live and die by our laptops. They have very different personalities and have been given names to suit. Smurf’s is Kristaal (with a star instead of a dot over the “i” please. And her name is because her mum just loves the Champagne but couldn’t remember how to spell it.) Kristaal is an uptight 16-year-old, who has a bit of an attitude about work. She could do it really fast and well if she just settled down and… what-averrrrrrr.

Mine is Beryl; or was. Beryl was a solid as a rock tuck-shop-mother who had a sick day in 1979. Beryl was never going to win a Nobel, but you knew she would turn up and that the sarnies would be ready by lunch. Beryl, however, got a touch of old-timers and had to be taken out the back.

In my company, they don’t get you a new one until they’ve exhausted the possibilities with the old one. The company says things like “they will rebuild it” (they have the technology, apparently). But because of the need for IT nerds to make themselves feel important about everything they do, they say things like, “We’ll have to blow it away”. Or, “We'll have to flatten it, then ghost it”. What they are actually describing is a process where they punch a couple of keys and walk away for an hour.

I tell you all this because the distressing outcome is that the computer that has been steadily added to and personalised (daily) for the last couple of years has been flattened and blown away and ghosted. Beryl is sitting up in hospital with a big bandage on her head and a giant vacant grin. She’s never felt better but can’t tell you her kid’s names.

Nothing is installed, I’ve got no goodies, the freakin’ dictionary that I’ve been adding to for ages now panics at the sight of “freakin’” and the list goes on. Subsequently I do not have the technical wherewithal to present the following the way I’d like - with some clever photo shop fiddle on a real estate agent’s For Sale sign. I’m just going to have to deliver it by hand -

It’s murder season at the moment, it appears, and people all over Whitetrashville Australia have been helping themselves to a nice, tall, refreshing glass of crazy. When an Estate Agent is selling a large place in Redhick Heights, they should now advertise it with ‘Large Kitchen/Dining - Enough room to swing an axe.’

I know half of you are going to say “Jesus Grey Area, a bit early, dontcha think?” I don’t care, I’m a speaker of the truth.

Steak Number 22, Your Human is Ready

In an interminable session from the frustrated roadies who check our public address system, it occurred to me that they are missing a real opportunity.

If you work in a building where the safety of the staff is so tenuous everything has to be checked fortnightly, you will know what I’m talking about. The man with the heavy Eastern European accent saying, “Dis iz a tezt ownly, tezt ownly,” followed by a bunch of alarms and messages. These are supposed to simulate the level of distress you are going to feel when your place of work finally bursts into flames. (ie; None)

In the particularly arduous PA system check that we sat through recently, the kid with the unpleasant voice must have said “Check One Two?” 500 times; it went on for the best part of 20 minutes.

I suggested to my workmate, Smurf, that there were opportunities here. Every couple of days the kid with the bad voice should move to a new Shakespeare sonnet. He gets to learn the canon as he tours the town checking the speakers, and I have not met a heterosexual girl yet who isn’t a little impressed if you can whip out some of The Bard. For the workers, if they choose to tune out, a sonnet is usually just hard enough to comprehend it can have the ‘rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb’ effect. For those who can’t help but tune in, it’s a little treat.

Then I thought - the young band trying to make it big can have their new single piped through the system for a few minutes, followed by a bit of a spruik from the ‘Check one two’ guy. He sells the ad time and gets a percentage. It’s a captive audience but we get to hear something different and no one has to be reminded of Craig McLaughlin.

On Mars for a Day Makes You Chew, Choke and Stay

I have speculated in the past that the newest so called ‘Mars Lander’, the Phoenix, was not on Mars at all but hanging around out the Back-of-Burk with my mother. (Ma's Lander)

I will have to retract the assertion now that the silly little bastard has gone and choked himself. His soil sampler is apparently all gummed up, and it is proving difficult to administer an interplanetary Heimlich on the electronic retard. I’m sure that if he was in the middle of the Australian desert with Mum, it would have been sorted by now.

An incident with a missing Beagle has coincidentally meant that the propeller-heads at NASA aren’t returning my calls. They should though because I am a man with answers when it comes to unusual problems. I’ve fixed an accelerator with a bicycle handbrake cable, and used rope as a windscreen wiper. (These are just some of my civilian solutions. There’s also some top secret gear protecting this fine country and your precious hide, that has the bum-print of yours-truly all over it. Think Attack Vampire Koalas and you’re getting close).

So why should they be picking up the blower to listen to my pearls? As mentioned, reports have come back from the surface of Mars that the Phoenix has bitten off more than he can chew. I’m assuming ‘he’. It sounds like something a bloke would do - Go to another planet and start hacking into the nearest crater. I like the guy’s lack of style.

This blokey problem requires a blokey answer. Either do it with a handbrake turn, or a full lock-up. Get the Mars Gasper up to full tilt, maybe even down a hill, and chuck him into a turn or throw out the anchors. It will perform the intergalactic equivalent of smacking his head on the dashboard - that should work loose the problem. More likely it will work loose the Martian sitting on his back with a funnel and a bucket, giggling as his Martian Mum says, “Don’t touch that! You don’t know where it’s come from.”

P.S. (Yes I know you’re not supposed to do the Heimlich anymore, it’s just a fun word.)