Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

It's looking grey out over the waterfront area of Hobart. Rain you say? A fair chance, I'd wager...

Yesterday I received the good news that I was to receive a prize. No, not the Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer or “Best Team Man” for the Lindisfarne Two Blues Under-8s, I have been humbled by “The Honest Scrap” award!

Tony – over there on ßench – has seen fit to honour my fine work here at this blog, and rescue me from the daily torment of having to think of something to write about. For that I am eternally grateful.

That said, I am also a contrary bugger, and award everyone who reads this post the award. Call me ~~lazy~~ generous, but I can’t just pick ten others, for fear of disappointing any of the two billion or so bloggers out there on the INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY.

As a recipient, I am to “tell ten true things about themselves in their blog that no one else knows”. On this point, I shall also be breaking the rules by posting five things today, and five things on Friday. I do this to ~~save me from thinking about something to write on Friday~~ best entertain you fine readers.

So here we go, part one of Ten True Things About Me:

I really don’t like the name Darren. Really. I hate it, actually. If someone comes up to me and says “Hi, I’m Darren”, it takes all my willpower not to spit on the ground in disgust. The Darrens that I have met in my life all seem to be bad eggs.

As an enthusiast of the sweet science – think geometry and physics fused with repeatedly hitting someone in the head – I was delighted when my childhood favourite to legally change his name to from ordinary old Marvin Hagler to the far more entertaining Marvelous Marvin Hagler. For a brief period there, I considered adopting the moniker Curious Kris McCracken.

Despite, or perhaps because of, spending a few good years of my life mired in the ‘grand’ works of Postmodern and Post-structuralist philosophy – think Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, and Kristeva (amongst a myriad of others) – I am reasonably certain that (a few interesting enough questions aside) for the most part it is a load of indulgent, po-faced, relentlessly negative and poorly written nonsense. I’d call it intellectual masturbation but masturbation is supposed to be pleasurable.

I have always had a thing for Romania. No idea why. You would think growing up with Ceauşescu as the standard bearer would have put a boy off, but it didn’t.

I subtly – too subtly it seems – tried to seduce my lovely wife in the winter of 1999. She did not properly fall for my immense charms until the late-autumn of 2001. In this sense, think of me a romantic form of hepatitis.

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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