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A SECURITY GUARD’S BOOK OF AWESOME NOTES, LISTS & IDEAS: FEATURING BRAIN TRAINING EXERCISESsecguar

Clarity Media (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, March 2015, ISBN 9781508827979)

I must’ve caught the security guard during his first few weeks on the job. He seemed never to have had trouble from anyone who refused to let him search their bag before. At first he just asked why I’d refused.

“Because,” I said, “it feels uncivilised for private citizens to search each other.” Continue reading

Hollows

PROPRIOCEPTIVE NEUROMUSCULAR FACILITATIONvoss

Voss, Dorothy (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, January 1985, ISBN 9780061425950)

When he closes his eyes, Damien Moore apprehends a cavity behind the blackness. It makes one think of a savage and marvellous god. Behind the space behind the darkness lives Damien Moore.

Damien even receives a sense of this unfathomable region’s extent. It feels wide enough to hold a novel, but not a phonebook. Continue reading

Tiririca

BRAZILIAN CLOWN’S POLL WIN THREATENED BY ILLITERACY CLAIMtir01

Associated Press (October 2006)

By subjecting Francisco Oliveira to a literacy exam, Brazil’s National Congress only enriched the metaphor. Then, instead of a clown in congress, they had a semiliterate clown in congress[1]. For a medley of ads from Oliveira’s electoral campaign, go to:

watch?v=HK4p35wYgXI

Continue reading

Crescendo to an error

Crescendo to an errormrblo

A certain private parking area near my brother‘s apartment includes fold-up pedestals that the spaces’ owners can upraise to defend them from other motorists. Each pedestal folds up into the middle of its parking space, where you lock it into place with a key. The distance between pedestals in adjacent spaces then becomes just one pedestal diameter less than the width of the space. Now instead of just blocking your space, the interloping vehicle blocks two spaces.

Hive pieces

HIVEhivelayout

Yianni, John (Gen42 Games, 2001)

This shows a set of pieces with cartoon artwork for the board game Hive. To turn them into a real set, I recommend sticking them to hexagonal bathroom tiles. Each set should contain three ants, three grasshoppers, one queen bee, two beetles and two spiders (making twenty two pieces in total). Continue reading

Motoring

CASK WINE UNDER FIRE AS GOVERNMENT PONDERS TAX HIKEwink

Hawthorne, Mike (The Sydney Morning Herald, April 2015)

I swing into the bottle shop with just enough fuel left to reach the petrol station on the corner. They’ve invited me to dinner twenty kilometres away in Southbank. By emptying my change jar, I’ve collected together seven dollars and fifty cents to divide between petrol and the bottle of wine I’ve said I’ll bring. Every cent I save on the wine improves the car‘s odds of getting there.

I locate a five-dollar bottle of rosé and then start foraging for something even cheaper to undercut it. Continue reading

Igloo

DO NOT OPEN: THE DISCARDED REFRIGERATORS OF POST-KATRINA NEW ORLEANSrefr

Laborde, Katheryn Krotzer (McFarland, August 2010, ISBN 9780786437894)

Colin knew the igloo would cause trouble. I’d erected it in our freezer from rings of ice-cubes I shaved so they’d lean in to make a dome. A tiny ice Eskimo kept watch near the door until, one day, Colin snapped it off to put into a drink. With its dying breath, the Eskimo vowed revenge. It placed a curse on the freezer.

After Colin moved to California to marry a woman he met on the internet, Hilary insisted we clear out the freezer so we could store food there. A hairdryer had no effect, so I started chipping out the igloo with a butter knife and mallet. Continue reading

Stopping All Stations Except East Richmond

TAKEN FOR A RIDEmetro_train_cut_CC

Royce Millar and Clay Lucas (The Age, January 2011)

Somewhere between Caulfield and Clayton a drunk whom the whole train watched brought his fist, without warning, down on top of the skull of a teenager sitting beside him. While the kid grabbed his head, the drunk turned towards the dumbfounded gentleman next to him and giggled that no other way existed to deal with an Asian.

At the blow, I stood at the other end of the carriage. It took me at least five seconds to barge in, plenty long enough for any of the onlookers to collect their wits and confront him. But no one did. Continue reading

Men without women

MEN WITHOUT WOMENmrblo

A friend of David’s owned only one glass. In the mornings he would drink milk with it. In the evenings he would drink beer with it. He held that the beer washed out the milk and then, in turn, the milk washed out the beer, so that he never needed to wash the glass. In the end he got quite sick.

Upside Down Miss Jane

MR. SQUIGGLE AND FRIENDSsquig

Dir. Virginia Lumsden Perf. Norman Hetherington. Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1959-1999. Television.

Down near the bottom of my resume, it reads:

“November 1979: Contributing television graphic artist, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)” Continue reading

Benji

BENJI
mrblo

We spent the month after our after our refrigerator entered Valhalla eating canned goods and Saltines. When they delivered the new refrigerator at last, Ken and Benji helped us shuffle it into the apartment. It looked like the fridge IKEA would sell you: a white, enamelled box with no curves or decoration.

Hilary and I dashed out to the supermarket. We placed Ken in charge of the fridge. When we left, its unrelieved cleanliness made it look like a vector model with the textures turned off. By the time we got back forty minutes later, Benji had written, “Phear My Elite Skillz” across the front of it in indelible marker. We found them trying to scrub it off with methylated spirits.

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      TINDER Sally Gardner ISBN-10: 1780621493 Many years ago, a strange thing occurred. I was browsing the fiction shelves of a well known, and now defunct, multinational bookstore whilst discussing the reasons books for adults were no longer illustrated (with another person, I’m not entirely mad). One argument was that it was … Continue reading