Rant du jour

Watching this (and I highly recommend you at least listen to it) almost puts me off Facebook. Almost.

To tell the truth, it's the scrabble that keeps me there. Playing around ten games of scrabble a week simultaneously with people I like (but haven't necessarily met) is a fantastic thing. I know I could do it outside facebook but I haven't the energy to organise that. For me, playing online scrabble in bulk is like being involved in a surreal game of concrete poetry. The next word I put down isn't always influenced by what letters I have on my rack, but also the 'tone' of the game, what words have been there before, and whether I want to make my opponent smile or not. The juxtaposition of words that emerge sometimes bends my brain, and that's a wonderful thing. I'd rather have an interesting board than win the game.

Other things that make me laugh at the moment:

-- India Ink's reminder of 'The A Rate', something most designers (and maybe other freelance-type industries) do, or should do; it's a practice I used to use when taxi driving.*

-- Bumblebee shifting his Sith casualwear uniform to Jedi casualwear by incorporating cut-off jeans (I decided, since he's shooting up so fast, to cut the bottoms off his jeans to look deliberately short rather than outgrown), a t-shirt that says 'Trust me, I'm a Jedi' and a pair of black and white trendy runners (the flat kind, with seemingly no sole). He walks around like he's Vinni Barbarino (age-appropriate reference). The hat remains on his head, on top of the carefully cultivated shaggy hair.

Things that make me wistful:

-- watching a building at the ANU get knocked down. It was an old wooden building that used to house community groups and small theatre and dance companies, and the food co-op. I once had a very exciting shag in a small dark room there with people in another nearby room. Or at least, that's how I remember it. It probably wasn't quite as exciting at the time! And now the room is gone. I'd like to say that something useful will be raised in its place, but the ANU is on a warpath, building useless expensive buildings that cost to much for anyone to be in and they can't afford the staff to fill them and they're getting rid of all the carparks and not providing decent bike paths but still giving out the same amount of parking permits and every morning is a frenzy of carpark finding but there's no safe way to ride in to the campus...

[DEEP BREATH]

heh, don't get me started on that one. Let's just say that if anyone gets knocked off their bikes on the Marcus Clarke side of the campus, please take the ANU to court for being culpable.


Have a nice day!


*Long ago (I'm sure I've mentioned this before) in the deep dark mists of time I spent about 18 months as a taxi driver, as a way of escaping a horrendously boring retail job turning around coathangers on racks in a women's clothing franchise, and before I managed to land a slushy little white-collar job in local government (which I also gladly left when my contract finished). I quite enjoyed taxi driving, and chose to drive at night, preferring to face drunks rather than the old ladies with shopping going only five metres.

Anyhoo, I would add a Suit Fee onto rude Public Servant passengers' cabcharges (the ruder they were, the less likely they were to write a total on the bottom of their forms) and offset this by giving needy people lifts (like young women walking home late at night, when the buses had stopped. It gave me a Robin Hood-like satisfaction that made the job fun.