A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

I've featured a lot of pictures looking north on Elizabeth Street, but from memory this is one of the few taken looking south. This was taken on Thursday, at around 4:30 pm, as I am grumpy waiting for the 4:20 express.

Sunday Top Five!

A wisp of melancholy and an intense feeling of being old accompanied my oversight of a "best singles on the past decade" list online yesterday evening. More precisely, I either failed to recognise, or flippantly dismissed most of the entries.

You see, my formative musical years happened some time prior to the year 2000. Thus, today's list. In chronological order, I present to you My Five Favourite Record Albums of the 1990s!

U2: Achtung Baby

R.E.M.: Automatic for the People

Pulp: Different Class

Radiohead: OK Computer

Wilco: Summerteeth

Just missing the cut were a long list, culled to a very short list that included: Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible; Portishead's Dummy; Guided by Voices' Alien Lanes; Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain; Radiohead's The Bends; and Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space.

No place for the Macarena, unfortunately.

What else have I missed? Who have I dissed?

Feel free to voice your dissatisfaction.

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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