Philately will get you nowhere everywhere

I bought some stamps yesterday, on accounta having a letter to post, and lo!


Barack Obama's face may be heading straight for the next run of quarters, but it's rightly yon glorious beagle who rides the envelopes. Australia Post, epistolary pro-dog-propagandists par excellence.

Seams, madam? Nay, it is.

Yesterday I came by a free pair of tweed trousers, and I have named them the Asspirational Pants. This, because for them - or me - to sit comfortably, their size relative to that of my noble posterior (or "ass", as they say in the land of Thoreau and Plath) has to change. Today I discovered a reliable source of vegan tiramisu biscuits (they're also gluten-free, if that interests anyone). I think it's clear that my noble posterior ain't going nowhere. Nurse Pattison, hand me my seam-letting gadgetry.

All day, all week

It's the 24th day of July, 24/7, and I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we owe the seven day week to God. (And Judaism, bless it.) What, on the other hand, has Niche ever done for us by way of convenient time divisions? Eh, Niche? What?

Awright. I'm off to karate.

Rhizopussy

I've just glanced down at the ingredients list on tonight's prefabricated soy nugget package, and it appears that I have ingested a hearty dose of Rhizopus Oligosporus. I knew there was a reason for sticking to lentils.

From the wall of the cubicle of the downstairs gels' bogs at work, a conversation

"God is dead." - Niche

"Niche is dead." - God

Who the hell is Niche?

Nietzsche

LMAO!

If you say that God is dead then you have to believe in God. God is immortal, so if you believe in God then you have to believe that God can't be dead.

It's a metaphor, dummy!

Felis felis and the moral quandary

As I let myself in an hour ago, X from next door scampered out of the cold cold night and into my (comparatively) warm warm flat. (Emma and Erin, who dropped by for breakfast on Saturday, suggested X might be called Janet, with a Wellingtonian accent, thus Jenut, so hinceforth, X wull be known es Janet-pronounced-Jenut.) Jenut hes been mountaineering over end through my furniture iver sunce she slupped un. Ectually, she's just made a nist un thus morning's bath towel, but before thet she was doing ixtraordinary cellusthinuc manouevres on top of the bookshelf. I'd be iver so heppy for Jenut to sleep over, only I don't want to make Her Nixt Door jilous, or worried, or whusker-diprived. Her Nixt Door hes a fraught rilationshup with Hum Nixt Door, end I suspict Jenut may be the one beam of sunlight un en otherwise binighted life. (I em basing thus observation, your Honour, on en argumint I heard through the wall two weeks ago.) Uf I put Jenut beck outside, I wull be diposuting her straight unto the maws of Siberia, which nonsinsucal mitaphor us to say: the rain ut raineth, cold and frostily.

Why is this not a word?

Dactyloglyphology: the study of signet rings.

Inter-mammal socialising

As my first houseguest at Harlot Heights, X (I didn't quite catch her name) enjoyed certain privileges, viz., scratching the armchair, sitting on the bookshelf, licking a blob of mushroom risotto on the kitchen floor, privileges that will not (I repeat, not) be extended to future visitors. Pipped at the post, comrades. Sorry about that.

Bless

One of the manifold delights of Harlot Heights is that it's 45 minutes by foots from kitchen to office. I canter across the Big, Bad Road, and then amble down the hill past Prestonian rose gardens, then amble some more through the badlands of Reservoir, then amble up along Darebin Creek, over a bridge, round a lake, across an oval, through a tunnel, until - ta da! - the Ivory Tower riseth before me, dew-bespangled and beige-bricked in the morning sun.

This morning the school kiddies had school, for the first time since Harlot Heights and I joined forces. And thus the lolly-pop lady. The lolly-pop lady is as tall as my armpits and as old as my Great Aunt Gerty and she wears a fluorescent yellow jacket and a white hat. She stood by her crossing, watching me amble down the street, portmanteau on back, spectacles on nose, rubber soles beneath my feet. She saw me and she thought, "Now here's a young ducky who doesn't know one end of a horseless carriage from t'other", and she pluckily marched out into the street brandishing her lolly-pop stop sign. She stopped traffic. Just for me. And then she said, "Have a good day, love."

I miss Wilbur

My brother sent this picture of intrepid Wilbur Harlot yesterday, and my heart went pit-a-pat. I miss him so. The one problem with beagles is they're not very good with the telephone.

Expensif Twaddle du Jour

If you thought Girlfriend mag peddled some of the most inane piffle in the history of tweenagehood, you would be correct. Here is your A+; the medal's in the post.

Many are the questions one might table for the contemporary adolescent's attention: chess club or recorder consort? which flies faster, a peregrin falcon or a Boeing 747? if your school were to stage a play about the Periodic Table, which element's part would you audition for?

Does Girlfriend put any of these questions? Does it? DOES IT? No. It does not. It is too busy expatiating upon the hawtness of Keira Knightley's boyfiend, the apparent necessity of bringing to one's formal an ipod, a small mirror, a kiwi-and-mango exfoliating scrub and the Hello Kitty collectors' edition of Das Kapital - it is too busy, I say, - asking "Are you a BINGE thinker?" (l'horreur!) to ask the questions that matter. Like: if "seven dog years equal one human year", when should beagles get the vote? I mean, really, these people are the legislators of tomorrow; we need them to start thinking about the issues now.

As for binge thinking, what, I ask you, is the point of parodying a magazine that dismantles its own credibility with such dizzying skill? Gels, do not, I implore you, do not think. It callouses the elbows so. And does terrible things to the bikini line.

Expert advice for the new financial year

Invest in stocks

while stocks last.

Just wondering

What's the onomatopoeic term for a herd of rampaging fleas suddenly launching onto one's shins like a hundred little iron filings sucked up by a giant magnet?

Louse in da house

I've never been to a Tupperware party, partly because I don't trust a product that specialises in marital aids for sheep, and partly because there are only so many airtight plastic containers a baron and amateur philatelist needs. I like the concept, though: if Tupperware parties were two-chocolates-for-the-price-of-one parties, or bagpipe appliance purchasing parties, or turquoise long john parties, I'd be in like Finn. (Flynn? Pnin? Whoever it was who was in.)

While we're talking communal japes with a consumerist twist, cast your een over this fine proposition, clipped from my local paper:

Headlice removal in your home! Discount for groups of three or more! If this doesn't lead to the rise and rise of Friday evening delousing parties, complete with canapes, then I'll eat my gnat.

At the markets

Me: Are all these shoes made of leather?

Shoe Chap: Absolutely. These are all one hundred per cent leather.

Me: Only, I'm looking for shoes that aren't made of leather.

[I'm a vegetarian; I don't eat leather shoes.]

Shoe Chap: Oh, well these ones aren't leather ... or these ones ... or these ones ... or these ones ... [x 20].

I am Baron, hear me roar!

I can't think of anything much more self-indulgent than posting photos of my spinster pad, but this is a blog, afterall. Self-indulgent is its middle name. And so, budding interior decorologists and turquoisophiles, girls and boys, step this way. I present to you "Harlot Heights", forty-nine square metres of dubiously-financed manor house.

This, here, is all the Florence Broadhurst wallpaper I could afford; frame by Target; picture rail by John the Handyperson.


And this here is the wee tilt I'm not mentioning to the bank:


And here you can see that Harlot Heights is superbly equipped with all the essential features of modern indoor living: floor, walls, and ceiling.


To say nothing of a pink loo, all the better for the plonking upon of one's posterior while the rest of one leafs through back issues of Country Home and Tweed magazine.


Here is a fine figure of a hatstand, flourishing in close proximity to my very own front door knob.

Here is my bedroom, and a bicycle wheel. Note that this is a distinct and separate and different green from the turquoise in t'other room. Let noone say that I don't do variety.


And here are five plastic animals on the kitchen window sill. They offer, I like to think, an eloquent commentary on the current state of the quarter acre block.

Really big fly!

Lucy Tartan's recently republished Giant Spider Pictorial reminded me of the fine feathered fly I met last summer. To those who doubt reports of steroid-abuse in the fly community, I say: that is my finger; I was there; there is no photoshoddery going on here; that fly really is as big as my distal phalanx.*


It is for reasons such as these - invertebrates on androgens - that I can truly say I am glad that I signed up for karate classes. I may be congenitally uncoordinated, unfit and inflexible, I may lack martial spirit and whatever it is that enables a person to ensure that the two ends of her belt are of equal length, but by golly, the next time a fly like this swings my way, I'm going to have the best bowing technique in town.

Meanwhile, it appears that the internet and I have been reunited, and I promised photeaux of mine house. I reiterate that promise. There will be photos of mine house (awright, my two rooms), I promise.

* I have this term on the good authority of Wikipedia, s.v. finger.