Casting Michael

Because it's going to take a military invasion to knock Michael off the front pages, I'm hoping the North Koreans keep up the current level of aggresive hijinks. Selfish, I know - but from my perspective, that's two nuts with the one cracker.

In all likelyhood it's not going to happen during this news cycle, so we're going to be Jacksoned until we shamow.

Today, ABC 2 were playing their music video program, Rage, and MJ was front and centre, of course.

I saw a couple of newer Michael Jackson videos I hadn't seen before and it made me realise that I actually hadn't seen him in a while. I must've stopped paying attention over the last few years, or he had the mask on more often than I'd credited. It came as a bit of a nasty shock (I don't know if you've noticed but he's a bit of a weirdo).

But from pain comes revelation. I've cracked the casting puzzle for who'll play him between the ages of 45 and 50 in the movie I'm tentatively calling Blame it on Vitiligo (Don't Stop Till You Get Caught). You might have your doubts, but if you see his music video for Stranger in Moscow, you'll know I'm right - it just sits up and grabs its own crutch.

Anne Hathaway.

C'mon! look at that picture and tell me I'm wrong.

This bit of genius also has the added benefit of making the conversation easier for all those young actors who'll have to tell their parents they're going to populate the Neverland bedroom film-set.

"Dad, I cracked a role in the upcoming Michael Jackson movie."

"Yeah? As a young Michael, circa Ben?"

"No. As one of his special friends."

"Over my dead body! Hang on. Who's playing Michael?"

"Anne Hathaway."

"Stand aside son. This is job for your father."

Speaking With Forked Tongue

"... and then the sssskinny ssssnake comes up to fatter ssssnake and he pulls out a gun and just goes chk chk..."

"Snakes don't have hands."

"What are you trying to sssssay?"

What, Too Soon? I Can't Believe I Took So Long

So, there’s going to be an unseemly outpouring of love for a weird old child molester (alleged) who had some catchy tunes. I get that. But what’s really got me spooked is that two days ago, my colleagues and I got into one of those strange places on the net when one of us asked, “Whatever happened to Bubbles?”

If you go looking for the whereabouts of Michael Jackson’s chimp, you will see a lot of articles claiming that he had been taken to a special institution after attempting suicide. That really tickled me. How did Bubbles the chimp attempt suicide? Was it Michael Hutchence style with a belt over the back of the hotel door? Did he try and dive his two seater Cessna into an apartment block but was talked down by air-traffic control? I need to know more.

Anyway, I’m currently working on joke that operates off the same principles as the Diana/Mother Teresa one. Something along the lines of,

“…. And then St Peter addresses the two of them and asks, “Ok, but who's the overly tanned, strange looking white lady with you?” and Farrah Fawcett points at Michael and says, “Hey, that’s no way to talk about the King of Pop!”

EC to the ECU, STAT!

Emergency Contact is really the Emergency Contact now.

She went off for a St John’s First Aid course this week and came back all empowered with the ability to save lives, raise the dead and walk on water… wait, no that wasn’t it. Something like that, anyway.

She avoided some pitfalls that others haven’t. For instance she got 100% in her exam, which my mother didn’t manage. When my mother was asked in her exam “How would you sterilise your hands?” She answered, “Boil them for 10 minutes.” The St John’s people take this sort of thing seriously and that just doesn’t cut the mustard (another way not to sterilise your hands).

She’s a funny little thing my Emergency Contact. She’s not that fond of crowds, question time after lectures, role playing and… well… people really, but she genuinely enjoyed the course. She said to me after day one, “They pulled out the defibrillator and I said, ‘Oh no you don’t! I don’t even drive a manual car, let alone start yelling CLEAR and doing that kind of thing’, but it’s really cool. It talks to you and walks you through what you’ve got to do and doesn't even send the charge to the paddles if it's not required.”

That really is pretty cool.

She also mentioned that if someone is flat-lining on the heart monitor, that's it. They don't even try. There has to be something there blipping away, but that doesn't make for good telly.

I remembered in my course that one of the most complicated bits of advice was where to put your hands to do heart massage. If I remember correctly, you had to take the line from between their eyebrows, line it up with something on the horizon, count three ribs and two nostrils up from the solar plexus, recite the Julian Calendar in reverse and apply one hand-width of pressure with two hands and start massaging. No happy endings. Or at least there weren’t whenever I did it.

So, with this fading in my mind, I asked EC how she’d gone with the heart massage after her second day. She said, “Easy, you just put your hands between their nipples.” Now that is a helluva lot easier than the description I remember carrying around in my head. I bet that some post-Victorian prudishness is behind that awful set of instructions - just so they didn’t have to say the word nipple. I wonder how many people have died or had their sternums cracked because people were embarrassed about saying ‘nipple’, in public.

AGA Helps You With The Future

In the not too distant future, Enhanced Reality will suffuse many aspects of our lives. A set of glasses containing a micro GPS unit, hooked up to the 3D net, will overlay the real world with graphics and text. W. Gibson predicts that artists will be able to produce work that injects itself into the common surrounds, that interest groups will have a channel that you can tune into to have all the aborted foetuses of the last week march down the street at you, and you’ll be able to take a tour of famous public deaths and watch River Phoenix writhing around on the pavement over and over again. Tourist channels will help with information in foreign cities and German car manufacturers will very quickly add the feature to the windscreens of their vehicles. All of a sudden, texting while you’re driving will seem like a sin from the dark ages.

“Hey, did you hear about Terry?”

“Nuh.”

“His beemer’s ER unit got lag.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah, he thought he was using a drive through bank and ended up in a Chinese restaurant at lunch time and was badly burnt by a pork bun in the lap.”

Cafe Ronery

A workmate was telling me that he goes into his local café to do his downloads. I wasn't listening properly and was disturbed. After clarifying, we moved on. He has an internet connection at home but just likes to use other people’s gear for the bigger stuff that might actually push his piddling download limit into the red.

I congratulated him on his outstanding tightness - which led to more confusion.

Not being a native English speaker, he thought that I was getting at something else and asked if it was weird to sit in a café by himself.

This led to some exploration of modern manners.

My answer was, “No. Sitting in a café by yourself is fine. Sitting in a movie theatre by yourself is not."

"Huh?" he enquired.

"In a café, particularly if you have an open laptop, you are the roving intellectual on sabbatical, just getting some quick marking done before you leap off to your torrid assignation with a local musician. Or, you are the action-archaeologist just confirming the 4-wheel-drive hire for your trip into the dead heart. In a movie theatre... there’s nothing else you could be doing. You’re just lonely.”

“What about in a restaurant by yourself?” he asked.

“Now this one can be tricky,” I said. “Some people just give off the lonely loser vibe but here’s my sure-fire tip for avoiding that and looking a bit interesting. You might even get a discount. Have a notepad and pen on the table next to you. This sends out the message that you are busy, perhaps a novelist or a journalist. You also stand a chance of being mistaken for a food critic which works well in most places other than Sydney or New York.”

Others then joined in to discuss other places where it was okay or not okay to be alone.

One felt that being the only man in a yoga class was a bastard. No matter where he rested his eyes, some woman always looked back at him in a suspicious manner. His yoga classes are not relaxing or fun anymore because he always, no matter what the position, has to look at the ceiling.

Being alone at the zoo is bad. You have either lost your kids, or you're there looking for someone else’s.

I suggested that riding a bike by yourself on a Sunday morning was bad. Smurf disagreed.

“I was always the one on the bike on Sunday morning because my bike was the only one with a basket for the papers and eggs.”

“No," I said, "I'm not talking about a hung-over smurf in ug-boots weaving towards a 7/11. I mean being some plonk in all the racing gear and taking it seriously. Maybe even sitting at the café by themselves with the bike out the front, halfway through their ride. That’s when it’s bad to be in a café by yourself... with a bike.”

All at the table nodded and looked at me, like the sage I am. I'm pretty sure.

Knife Shopping

Emergency Contact and I had allowed ourselves to fall into an absolutely parlous state. Dunno how it happened. She just became a frat-house boy and I became a toddler. We were down to no grocery supplies and, walking down the hall last night, I was physically threatened by one of the dust bunnies.

It might have been the cat leaving that did it. Suddenly the burden of responsibility had lifted and we really dropped the ball.

(We were cat-sitting for a few weeks - perhaps more on the evil-genius “Peoples” later. Perhaps not. The net’s full of people banging on about cats. Come to think of it, the net’s just full of people banging.)

Sometimes I hear grown-ups talking about coordinating the weekly shopping and all the complication and choreography it entails. Supermarket shopping is not one of my top-ten best-ever things to do on a Saturday morning. I can think of better things, and at the top of the list is NOTHING. But my local supermarket won me this morning. I’m back there next Saturday - and I’m taking friends.

So, full of corrective vim and vigour and determined to go early enough on a wet winter’s morning to have the aisles myself, I launched into the task.

I don’t know who they’ve got programming the music at the place, but I want to shake them by the hand. Actually, I want to go out dancing with them and shake it.

The veggies were knocked over to I Want You by Marvin Gaye (you just never hear that - and it’s a corker).

I swung into the meat aisle to Every Time We Say Goodbye (proper Ella version). Now that may seem odd, but it really worked. It’s the aching but oh so catchy melody as you gaze longingly at slaughtered animals. I had a lump in my throat as I took a hard left into the bathroom-type aisle.

Aspros were thrown accurately into the trolley from 15 metres to the surging bow-chicka-chicka of Theme for Love (big, bad Bazza White and the Sound Unlimited Orchestra).

The hard right into the biscuit aisle was acutely matched by a hard stylistic turn into Curiosity Killed the Cat. WTF! Brilliant!

I dealt with dairy to Hotter Than July, S. Wonder. And when you’ve got a shopping trolley that is also doubling as your Hammond organ, your already well-honed Stevie Wonder impersonation is just given that little extra something. Being blind can also be the excuse for the little extra chocolate something that accidentally creeps into your trolley.

Cleaning and the laundry type stuff - Pennsylvania 6500. Benny Goodman’s Big Band gave me that little lift for the final push into the smallgoods and margarine section.

My big finish is something that Ferris Bueller couldn’t have orchestrated better (and it’s as though this supermarket music scheduler had read my tiny mind).

It was time to pay or go back for some roasting veggies I’d forgotten. To do this, I had to cover the width of the supermarket in the laneway between the shopping aisles and the cash registers. As I was contemplating my options, Mack the Knife, Bobby Darin started. That sealed it; I was going back for the veggies. There was critical time to be wasted.

I was surfing back up the aisles to the registers, standing on the trolley and singing the penultimate,

“Well the line forms

on the right, dear”

and of course, gesticulating to the right, “Now that Mackie’s back in townnnnnnnnnn” .

Getting it bang on cue for the big finale.

See, now that wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t gone back for the veggies, because I would have been coming from the other end, and therefore gesticulating to the left.

Winningest Winton

I’m probably going to get asked to hand in my Australia card (What? You don’t have one? Bugger!) when I say this, but, I don’t get the Tim Winton thing.

I’ve tried, too. He owes me for making it through Dirt Music. The Riders? Hell, that was enough to put me off Europe and there are others where I’ve thought, “I’ve got a problem. Tim Winton is like Magic Eye puzzles. What is everybody else seeing, that I’m not.”

I guess that’s just the nature of art, but there seems to be pretty strong agreement elsewhere about him. He’s just won his 27th Miles Franklin-Gordon award and that’s exactly why you shouldn’t put rivers in charge of literary awards.

Poh Go Sick

Haiku On The Loss Of Poh From MasterChef

Oh Poh no go, so

I am going to miss you because you are I am pretty sure I reckon the hottest woman on Australian tv with your cute outfits and being Lucy Liu's better looking sister and always making me laugh with your self deprecation and scarves and being an artist and smart and stuff

Settle like dumplings

(Some rules are built to take to another level, yeah?)

S-bending Spree

Money is evil. I can prove it.

I could go into some elaborate diatribe on the nature of Third World debt, the destructive rise of mono-culture-agri-business and the extreme plots being perpetrated by the race of giant lizards that run the World Bank… but instead, I’m going to bring it closer to home.

A couple of days ago, I was in the bathroom standing with my hands in my pockets (I like the way it makes me look more innocent) and I pulled out a tissue that I wanted to throw away. (I know! How much more interesting can a blob get?! I mean, reading that last sentence back, I’m tempted to just leave it there. Had my hands in my pocket, found a tissue, wanted to throw it away. Dusts palms, declares his work done and posts the blob.)

So, as I pulled the tissue out, a five cent piece came out with it, did nice little arc and plopped into the toilet where it settled to the bottom and glinted prettily at me.

It is now starting to taint the porcelain, and really quickly. The toilet needs cleaning every ten minutes. The toilet is being tainted by the money. You can see what I am oh-so-subtly pointing at here, can’t you?

I said to Emergency Contact that she could keep it if she fished it out, but she just snorted at me. Honestly.

Bendrew J Eltvis At Work

Backpack To Basics

What the hell are the kids up to? What the hell are they carrying around in those huge backpacks? I’d suspect them of being up to something, if they didn’t look so downtrodden with the weight of it all.

When I went to school, my small leather satchel usually contained one book, a very old banana that was trying to change shape, a cicada shell to put on the back of Sally’s jumper because she was so cute, and a pencil case. Not always with pencils in it. That was it. I seemed to learn stuff. I can do a bit of arithmatic in my head and I can fudge my way through a day at work. Sure, my spelling remains atroshuss, but more fourth form text books were never going to be the answer to that little dilemma.

But these days, there appears to be some disconnect between the promise of the interconnectivity of the entire planet and the amount that these kids are dragging around in their school cases. Surely they should be dancing around with a 1 gig USB drive attached to the same chain as their bus-pass, which has all their school books and homework all loaded up on it from the home computer, ready to shunt into the networked laptop at school.

I’m seeing the opposite. I saw a kid the other day dragging his second backpack behind him on a sales-rep trolley because his little bowed beast-of-burden back was already loaded up with the primary backpack. Both the bags had the school emblem on them too, so it was obviously expected of him to be that loaded up.

When I was a bus driver (see, I told you my schooling was just fine and helped elevate me to the headiest heights of achievement) I used to regularly carry a cute little girl on my afternoon schools run. She was 5 (and would hold up one tiny, outstretched hand to demonstrate the exact number of years) and was small enough that, under the weight of her ridiculous school backpack, she would actually go down on all fours to climb up the stairs into the bus. It broke my heart each afternoon, but she didn’t expect any different, so didn’t seem too put out by it.

Once we were near her home and she’d abseiled out of the bus, she’d race me down the street. I’d always give her a bit of start. Partly so I could keep her in my eye-line, and partly because I was always amused by the sight of that huge backpack, seemingly levitating by itself as it charged off. (Nothing could be seen of the girl from behind. It was deep enough that you couldn’t even get a clear view of her shoes)

As I’d draw level, I’d see her working away underneath the straps, bouncing up and down, little arms pumping like a 200 metre sprinter. The backpack had so much mass, that it would remain completely level and her shoulders would only come into contact with the straps at the top of each bounce. She was visually reminiscent of a locomotive, with all the movement of the pistons happening around the wheels, and the seeming suspension of the boiler, travelling along unfussed by all the activity.

So, anyway, I hope all this bookishness is going to add up to some very clever people, because their little scoliosed backs are not going to be up to the task of manual labour, once they graduate.

Paws To Reflect

I usually like to keep it light and fluffy here in A Grey Area, but I have some sad news. Kitty in the Carpark just met an untimely end on the main road outside the building.

The warehouse boys will be holding a tasteful little memorial service, where he will be buried with full Hi Viz jacket honours.

RIP Kitty.

If you want to see the only photo I got of him in his Hi Viz jacket, click here.

(Actually, he wasn't wearing his vest - just goes to show...)

When We're Not Looking

"... and then I said, when Xing Xing gets on the talking scales, they go - one at a time, please."

"Stop it! You made bamboo come out my nose."

The Toast With The Most

As Australia mourns the removal of an overweight submariner with a yen for the cordon blurch from MasterChef, I can see the influence of the show sweeping through the burbs.

My corner café is a shabby little affair. It's in the basement of a high-rise apartment block and I’m pretty sure the space was not intended for use as a restaurant. In fact, I’m sure the main expectation of the clientele is to have somewhere to sit and chat with other mums while the sprogs belt around and run off the last sugar hit. What I’m getting at here is that it's not the sort of place you go for a fine-dining experience. 

So I sat down this morning and ordered some French toast, asking the waitress if I could make a pain of myself and add some bacon to the plate. 

She said, “Oh, that’s fine - some people like the Canadian influence in their French toast.” 

I felt that was guilding the lily a little, describing my gluttony as having a northern hemispherical influence, but whaddayagonnado?

When my meal arrived, it was, well… it was spectacular. They’d done that thing with the syrup where it was drizzled in artistic patterns across the plate (that is going to be a thing of passing fashion, mark my words) and the stack of bacon was arranged on the toast, which was also arranged. I was quite taken aback. It was brilliant.

Now, just as long as it doesn’t go too far. The mistake with this sort of thing is when people of little talent or experience get delusions of grandeur and ruin good, simple things by going OTT. 

We used to have a solid little local café that would get our patronage at least once a week. It shot itself in the foot by going all highfalutin. They couldn’t really deliver and Cornish game hen with fennel, garlic and rosemary wasn’t what people wanted on a Saturday morning anyway. You have to work hard to drive the only café on an inner-west Sydney train-station out of business, but they managed it.

P.S. Go Poh!

Oils Aint O1ls

I have no way to link the two observations in this blob other than lick them and push them together roughly. I could go for some jury-rigged, spurious connection by sticky taping them together like, “the cwazy things that people do” but it’s too thin and you, the discerning reader of this humble blob, wouldn’t fall for it. I‘ll just have to rely on flattery, you marvellous, loyal and attractive thing, to gain your trust and make you feel that the esoteric connection is there for all to see, and that only the most naïve critic would pretend that it wasn’t obvious. And that’s the good oil.

Recently I saw the number plate, GUN O1L. This immediately struck me as odd. This person obviously didn’t get the plate of their choice. The one with an “I” instead of a “1” would go first, wouldn‘t it? Now, how many people need a number plate that spells out, one way or another, gun oil?  

And an ad on telly for health stuff, where the product is “super fish oil.” Said quickly, with a solid Australian accent, super fish oil is not something you personally, or your blog, want to be called.