Tag Archives: non-fiction

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Shogun of Finance

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THE VIRTUAL FUTUREbain

Bainbridge, William Sims (Springer, 2011, ISBN 9780857299031)

A few years ago, Colin, Owen and I filmed two cringeworthy little videos as part of a plot to send one of our number to Iceland,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mspRGw00O2U

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmhAqoYgtgQ,

Today, I discovered synopses of the two, running to about three-quarters of a page, in William Bainbridge’s The Virtual Future,

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=WPcSFaXcEd4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA127#v=onepage&q&f=false

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El Shaddai

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BOOK OF EXODUSHoly Bible

Chapter 21 (Holy Bible, ISBN for example 9780060649234)

Without any warning, my neighbour put three poodles in his yard. He went from none to three in a single black afternoon. After that he paid them little attention. As far as you could tell, they never left the yard. From morning until night they bombarded the neighbourhood with shrill barrages of barking that tore your concentration in two. They’d cease just long enough to let you collect your thoughts back together before shattering them again with the next barrage.

When home, their owner would bawl at them to shut up from behind his screen door. On other evenings, enraged neighbours assumed the role. It seemed like just a matter of time before some neighbour rationalised euthanizing them with poisoned meatballs. Continue reading

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Earlier Work [pt.2]

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THE FRANTIC AND EXHAUSTING LIFE OF A PARLIAMENTARY MEDIA ADVISER colinposter

Jacobs, Colin (7 August 2014; Crikey.com.au)

I bundle out of the train in short-pants and find a phone box to call Colin. I’ve started explaining where to meet me when Colin screams and I hear the receiver clatter against the tabletop.

When he comes back on a few minutes later, Colin explains that from his kitchen window, he saw his car start to roll back down the slope out of his garage. He ran out of his house and slapsticked along beside it trying to get the key into the lock as it picked up speed, rolled down the slope and through the neighbour’s fence in front of an audience of staring children. Continue reading

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Lynx

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ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN FOR LYNX DEODORANTlynx

At some point we seem to have accepted that, as peasants, if a bank or other large company imposes on us a penalty fee, for instance for paying a bill slower than they’d like, that as long as the company does it following the company’s own rules, we should find it fair for them to charge it. The historian of the future must see us as sufferers of Stockholm syndrome – as forlorn hostages who’ve somehow come to feel they owe something to their captors.

Have we forgotten how we got here? While you and Daisy ran hand-in-hand in the garden, ecstatic in the rain, they set about to laying claim to all the best flowerbeds and fencing them off. Now they charge you for the flowers and have convinced Daisy’s mother that if you don’t send seven a week, you don’t respect her. The Shamshiel they’ve posted at the gate doesn’t even have a flaming sword, just a valium of meaningless apologies. Continue reading

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Floorplan

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FLOORPLANcricoidhall

This shows a floorplan for a ring-shaped hall with buttresses.

To support the vaults, I imagine the columns stretched into crescents along the concentric axis. I think it might please the eye if the linear distance between each crescent’s tips equalled a third of the length of the curve between its centre and the centre of whichever of the two neighbouring crescents around from it clockwise or counterclockwise stands the farthest away. Continue reading

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Reply to Johnstone’s “50 Proverbs”

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Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. You’ll have him out of your hair until he comes by tomorrow for his next fish.

Teaching him to fish will feel like teaching a walrus to roller-skate. As soon as you break out the fishing rod he’ll look at you like you come from the seventeenth century – like you tried to tell him he could knap his own spearheads with a hammerstone and pair of reindeer antlers. He hasn’t got time to screw about with bait and fishing rods and sinkers. He just wants a fish.

Even if you get him to try it, he’ll just pretend to pay attention and spend most of the time fantasising about the woman in apartment twelve.

Give the man a fish.

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Coen moment

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COEN MOMENTmrblo

From my backyard in the middle of the night, I can see the cars on North Road whipping past gum trees while five other backyards sleep in silence. In one of them, my neighbour Chen has two identical woollen yellow sweaters drying on his clothesline. Chen has spaced them out so they fill the space, leaving a gap to either side the same width as the space between them. They have crisp black V-necks and no creases or sun bleaching, floating there in a sliver of lamplight in the middle of the night.

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Flighnay

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REMAINS TO BE SEEN: TRACING JOE HILL’S ASHES IN NEW ZEALANDrema

Davidson, Jared (Rebel, 2011. ISBN 9780473189273)

In a bum one sees the mystery of how he got there. Seasick Steve ran away from home. Joe Hill fell into the Great Depression. Ours came from a tatterdemalion public library on Cooke Street, where he’d spent the morning chroming petrol from a lemonade bottle. Whomever they’d sent to pick him up hadn’t arrived, so we offered him a lift home in Colin‘s Subaru.

The bum lived in a shelter on a street he pronounced, “flighnay!” Continue reading

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Bandwagon

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HOME INSULATION PROGRAMaudit

Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (ANAO Audit Report No.12 2010–11; Commonwealth of Australia, 2010; ISBN  0642811563)

When Labor spun open its home insulation subsidy in 2009, a thousand insulation dingoes all across the country started fighting to get their muzzles under the spigot.

When the first one phoned, I explained that I already had grey insulating powder in the crawlspace. When their tradesman came, he found I had too much grey insulating powder to qualify for the subsidy. Continue reading

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Review Of The Cover Of The Warriors Of Batak

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WARRIORS OF BATAKbatak

Campagna, Dan (Task Force Games, 1982)

Somewhere in the last century, the boilerplate book cover for fantasy roleplaying products became a picture of two magical warrior women in cleavage-armour confronting each other from the backs of dragons[1]. Continue reading

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