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.