Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

There has been some pretty shocking weather today: hot, incredibly windy, dusty, and - worst of all - smoky because of some bushfires around the state. You can see the effect on the view from Salamanca Place across Sullivan's Cove to Hunter Street.

I have a theory about hairdressers that involves an elaborate and sophisticated system of overlapping and interlocking – yet deviously independent – plans, plots and cunning schemes to perpetuate the greatest hoax on humankind since that whole notion of New Coke (what a gyp that was).

No, I’m talking about the tendency to shamelessly exploit the vanity of women by lobbing on a thirty percent tariff for seemingly having the temerity to even walk into a salon. No, that’s an everyday garden variety scam. What I am talking about is something far more sinister, and ultimately, something far more dangerous.

You may well be familiar with the concept of the Große Lüge, or – if you like – the 'Big Lie'. The Große Lügeconcerns a lie of a magnitude so immense that no one could seriously believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. At its very core, the concept asserts that people will sooner believe a big lie than a small one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will eventually believe it.

What I suspect our cabal of Machiavellian barbers, hairdressers and stylists are doing in an orchestrated, sustained and inhuman campaign designed to rob humanity not just of its money, but of its dignity as well.

What else could explain otherwise rational human beings to part with significant quantities of cold hard cash to not only allow someone to desecrate the very hair on their head, but then consent to flounce around with a poorly executed dye job, a shoddily cut fringe, and seemingly random clumps of hair snipped here and there?

Fashion?

Fashion is supposed to make you look good.

Fashion is supposed to make you feel good.

Fashion is supposed to make other people want to touch you in your naughty places and groan your name while they lick your ear and stroke your thigh.

[Ahem]

Political theorists have described the most insidious form of power as that which sees individuals internalise and replicate the very nature of their oppression.

It should be obvious that power is more effective the less visible it is. Of course, there are many visible and invisible power relationships and dynamics that happen every day in human society. Yet, not all power is measurable. Power is not just about suppressing conflict, but in the absence of conflict itself!

No more clearly can this be seen than in the range of dud haircuts that are sighted every day of the week.

So keep your Zionist conspiracies, keep your military-industrial complex, your race of reptilian humanoids, Area 51s, homosexual agendas, global warming hoaxes,illuminatis, or your 9/11 fit ups covers ups and fuck ups. You can keep the lot of them!

Of course, I can’t prove it.

Yet...

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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