Dancing in the streets (if we're lucky)

Yesterday on the tram, I sat opposite a man who looked as if he'd given up on life. His trackpants were smeared with what looked like marmalade, and he was only wearing one shoe. He stared straight ahead, his mouth half open. Each time the tram stopped, he would let out a monotone 'yay.' This happened at every tram down Brunswick Street and continued into the city. 'yay.' 'yay. 'yay.'

When I got off, he was looking down at his feet and seemed quite stunned to see that his left shoe was missing. His mouth gaped.

There are so many amazing crazy people in Melbourne. It's impossible to walk down Bourke Street without almost tripping over some woman who looks like Janis Joplin. There are so many crazy people that people don't even know who you're talking about when you bring them up. Back in the days when I kicked around in Dunedin, my humble university town of 120,000 people, there were a handful of crazies that everyone knew. Everyone knew 'Clappy', the man with no teeth who busked outside Countdown by slapping his hands

together, usually out of time. Everyone knew 'Speedy', too; a little weaselly man who walked through the Dunedin streets at a constant speedy case and carry two suitcases on wheels. There was especially Joan the Butcher, an alcoholic Susan Boyle lookalike with a moustache who would take her knickers in public and sometimes sit on people.

There are many famous anecdotes about Joan Butcher. Here is one of them.

"Once I was in South Dunedin at the fish and chip shop and I asked for 2 blue cod. 10 minutes later when my order was ready I found instead of two blue cod the guy had given me two "corn on the cobs" (I wondered what he was saying when he was clarifying my order.....)

Anyways, I didn't want this deep fried corn on the cob so I was leaving I saw Joan sitting on the ground, I went up to her and asked if she would like it, as Joan lifted her head up from her bag I realised she had casually vomited in her bag and had vomit all over her face. A bottle of vodka was situated beside her. Joan was very grateful to me and continually shouted out thank you as I walked down the street."

A quick YouTube search in fact reveals numerous videos of Joan, some with thousands of views. That is how famous she is.

But Melbourne's crazy people are too many to list. I remember a man with a grey beard who

came into our local laundrette with two budgies on his shoulders and sang everyone an impromptu version of 'Sweet Caroline.'No one I've ever met has ever seen or heard of him. Perhaps us Melbournites should start talking about our favourite crazy people casually in conversations and eventually we will have our own Joan the Butcher.

I have also decided to start looking up outdated pop culture references in The Golden Girls.

BLANCHE: Well, I don't like you Dorothy.

DOROTHY: Well Blanche, horizontal stripes make you look like Roger Ebert.

This is Roger Ebert.

Here are some facts about Roger Ebert.

1. Roger Ebert is one of America's most prominent film critics. He is the first person to win a Pulitzer prize for 'film journalism.' In other words, his reviews get the best reviews.

2. In the early 70s, he became good friends with Russ 'Faster Pussycat Kill Kill' Meyer and they wrote several screenplays together, including this one.

Ironically, it received terrible reviews.

3. He was an alcoholic but then sobered up and wrote a blog about it. Here is the blog. It's pretty good.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/08/my_name_is_roger_and_im_an_alc.html

4. He once dated Oprah. She later claimed that he was her key to getting on TV and, hence, taking over the world.

5. He told Michael Moore to make THAT Anti-Bush speech at the Oscars (maybe it was because they look very similar).

6. Some of his readers consider that he views horror films with a bourgeois elitism because he usually gives slash movies a low rating.

7. He has his own film festival called Eberfest. The theme is usually 'out of print silent film.'

And now, with Roger Ebert uncovered, the joke is funny. Funnier. I imagine the writers of Friends imagine Phoebe Buffet to be a bit like a young Rose Nyland. It didn't really work.

A whole Agnew world

The Melbourne weather is chilling; 4 degrees in fact. Today it hailed; one of those not that common occurances that never really seems to excite anyone but someone will always bring up at the dinner table (or around the TV if you don't have dinner table). The cold unifies people in a way. Your cashier will bring it up or the person next to you in the lift and you agree heartily. Even people who hate each other or those of extreme awkward social grace can have a conversation about the weather on a day that cold. It's the best conversation starter you'll ever have.

I have been reading up on Spriro Agnew; The 39th Vice President of the U.S under Nixon. Here are some thoughts and facts:

1. Has there ever been a biographic film about an American Vice President?

2. Spiro Agnew pretty much is a character from The Wire. I would imagine Councilman Tommy Carcetti would be like in another ten years. He even comes from Baltimore.

3. His campaign slogan when he was running for governor was 'Your house is your castle.' What?

4. When he ran for Vice under Nixon, the Democrats hated him so much that they made this commercial:

5. Spiro Agnew spoke out intensely against anti-war protests during Vietnam. He told everyone it was completely Un-American. He was also against any footage of the Vietnam war from being shown to the American people. During this period, he was commonly referred to as 'Nixon's hatchet man.'

6. He and Nixon had a falling out and, for the last three years, Nixon froze him out of all the import White House decisions and would only see him at cabinet meetings.
Apparently Nixon did this because he was jealous of how much the public preferred his Vice to him. During his second term, he kept Agnew on because he was popular was voters, and once said at a press conference that the only reason he had him his Vice was that "No assassin in his right mind would kill me because then they would be stuck with President Agnew." Agnew later claimed in his memoirs that Nixon and his Chief of Staff Andrew Haig were going to have him assassinated if he didn't resign during Watergate and told him "go quietly...or else."

7. Agnew inspired a fashion craze of 'Spiro Agnew watches' which everyone started wearing; Republicans to show their support and Democrats because they thought it was funny. It is pretty funny.

Why did no one make a Sarah Palin one of these??!

8. He served in France and Germany in World War II. That was a casual thing that you could put on your CV back in those days (and blatantly would have). Now John McCain puts Vietnam on his CV. We'll know were old when the oval office has an Iraq veteran running the country. Shudder.

9, He is played by Robert Marshall in Oliver Stone movie, but apparently he is only in for two minutes (out of 192 minutes).

10. In season 3, episode 5 of the TV show Angel, Angel has a conversation with Fred's father in which he says that Spiro Agnew was a demon. Fred's father replies that Agnew couldn't have been anything else.

Second Famous people are much more interesting than famous people. I might do another one tomorrow. Stay tuned, as they say.

During my travels around the Internet, I also came across this delightful piece which comes up as a finance article on the News 7 Daily web page (which even has a weather report) but News Daily 7 quickly turns into a payment form if you click on any of the links to other news sectors.

http://www.news7dailyjobs.com/?t202id=630303&t202kw=cpa

Does anyone else find this really offensive?

Right. Time for tea and then sleep. And then tea.

And this.

Gumtree at its absolute best.

How do you decide which shade of black to wear?

Flat hunting, or as Australians call it 'House hunting.' I have had more than one irate Australian breath heavily down the phone at me and tell me, in a quiet voice, that 'I think you'll find this is NOT a flat.' It is.

It's a delicate dance, this business. First there is the online application, which involves scouring Gumtree for potential dwellings and dwelling-mates. It's a difficult task, trying to find the gems amongst bovved entries such as 'exhausted guy needs room in cool flat ASAP!!' However, things can be whittled down pretty quickly, once you count out outer suburbs, share rooms, flats with cats, anything south of the river, ads which describe the house as 'damp but cosy' and people who use the wrong 'your' in the opening paragraph. There are also ads that will never be answered by anyone, like this one

Gumtree fail.

Once you've found one that looks suitable in a pinch, there is the delicate task of describing yourself as a potential share houser. Usually its a matter of sounding like you are employed but interesting, independent but part of a team, clean but not anal, enjoys an early night but is also the life of the party, intelligent but non judgemental. What ends up happening is that, in a desperate bit to stay neutral, you end up saying nothing about yourself.

"I Like my music, chilling out, sometimes up for a drink or a party, but saying that not a complete party animal. I'm a pretty easy going sort of person. I likes to sit down and have a cuppa and a chat, but also likes own space."

Sometimes your don't hear back, sometimes you do. And then begins the city hopping trek of meeting and greeting your prospective housemates. In this step, you sit on opposite couches, asking dull questions and laughing politely at each others jokes about the state of the front garden or the abstract painting over the fireplace. Occasionally you are offered a glass of wine but this a rare and privileged exception. Usually, the interviews are kept to a 15 minute maximum after which the next ad replier will be knocking at the front door. Sometimes, the house dwellers will take down notes on in an exercise book as you speak; sometimes they will ask you to leave the room while they discuss your living potential. Usually at this stage, I am sweating like a demon after a 20 minute bike ride and all the questions I want to ask have vanished into the ether. I am left with inane queries such as:

"So, like, what's the general vibe of your guys flat...I mean House?"
"Oh you know, its like, pretty chilled out. We like to hang out together sometimes but we also like our own space."
"Mmmm yeah that sounds great."

What you really need to is to cut the crap and ask the questions that you're actually curious about. Like:

"Are you one of those people who leaves their washing in the machine for days after its finished, because I fucking hate it when people do that."

OR "Would you be annoyed if I brought home a party of friends to listen to funk music at 3am or would you get amongst it?"

OR "Do you boil your mooncup in a pot on the stove?"

At one house, I was forced to sit on the veranda and read from a book of poems. The poems were written by the dizzy head flatmate who told me she inspired a song by the alternative band Beach House. At another house, I sat and talked to the creatures who lived there about their desire to have a 'gangsta party.' Their desire ran so deep, it seemed, that they had already spray painted neon gangsta graffiti over two walls of the kitchen. In one area, the paint had dribbled down and left a neon pool of yellow on the top of the stove. I smiled and went on with the questions, unable to tell them that I would rather fall down a flight of stairs than live in their spare room. As I left, I realised that the stool I had been sitting on was actually a broken, rusty TV.

But its all worth it in the end, all the dull interviews and the hectic bike rides and the flowery poetry. There's always another door to knock on.

And this is why I love Shallow Grave.

Trams

One of the girl singers from ABBA has put out a solo album. It's called 'My colouring Book' and listening to it is like staring at a colouring book where everything has been coloured in with manic highlighters, both inside and outside the lines. It's quite lovely but I have to have at least one strong, black coffee to get me through it. 'My Colouring Book' works as a nice contrast to The Shaggs, a no-talent prepubescent girl band from the Sixties who were overweight, acne scarred and sang tuneless songs about Halloween and their lost cat, 'Foot Foot.' It's rather a cruel name for the band given that none of them are even remotely shag-able.

Yesterday on the tram, I was reading a play called 'Wiping my Mother's Ass.' It is exactly as it sounds and is not a very good play. A woman with a pinched nose sitting across from me give me a dirty look when she saw what I was reading. She was reading some kind of Vodafone pamphlet. The man next to her didn't have anything to read but seemed quite intent on examining his fingernails. He was weedy and wore a suit that was slightly too big for him. From time to time, he tried to read bits of the Vodafone pamphlet over the woman's shoulder. After a few minutes of this, the pinched face woman closed the pamphlet and shoved it deep into her handbag. She gave the weedy man a sharp, angry glance and turned her neck to stare furiously out the window. The weedy man got off at the next stop and the pinched face woman reached into her handbag and went back to her Vodafone pamphlet. I went back to Wiping my Mother's ass. It wasn't that great.

Playing pool

Monday is a good day for the Fitzroy community pool. I swam a bunch of laps and watched people. There are no aqua joggers but a lot of people seem to have taken to wearing flippers in the lanes. They swim very fast but you'd expect them to. It's the fast swimmers without the flippers that really impress the rest of us. The ones in speedos with Adonis figures. There seems to be a congregation of them at the start of the week, flexing and talking about their girlfriends at the start of the fast lane. They don't swim that much but I guess they don't have to with bodies like that. Sometimes, when they get tired of standing around in waist-high water they lie down on the bleachers, arms behind their heads with their arm pit hair exposed. I find it pretty sexy despite myself.

All this I witness through quick glimpses, occasionally taking extra long between breathes and take every chance to de-mist my goggles. In the medium and slow lanes, less attractive people swim with less impressive strokes. They stop more often than I do but with less pervy intentions. The life guards amble around the sides of the pool not doing much. They are also unattractive but might be less so without the wrap around sunglasses and yellow polo shirts.

I sat with two of the Adonises in the sauna. Their conversation was dull but their aesthetics pleased me. One had a loud voice and a smattering of chest hair, the other--James according to his mate--was soft spoken with serious pectorals. I sipped from my water bottle and pretended to stare into space. It was an excellent seven minutes and then I reluctantly had to exit before the temperature made me pass out. I tried the steam room but was sorely disappointed by the lack of Goodbodies on display, only a small Asian woman in a brown bikini. We smiled quietly at each other and after a few minutes, went on our separate ways.

The woman at the front desk is called Annie. She is a rather dull looking woman with a mess of hoop earings in her ears and she wears sweat pants. She works behind the desk every day of the week or so it seems. I wonder if she goes swimming in the pool. I wonder if she pervs at the Goodbodies. I would get probably not given that she has extremely thick spectacles and is probably legally blind if she takes them off. But you never know.

India and that

Well, Hamish and I are now in Jaipur, Rajistan. Can honestly say it is not our favourite town; there is rotting filth everywhere and children covered in flies go through the rubbish bins which smell so bad that we have to hold our breath when we walk past them.

There are many animals scurrying about, mainly cows and goats but in Jaipur there are also a lot of massive pigs which roll around in the rubbish and squeal with delight. There is an excess of mangy dogs; we saw one that looked like its skin was falling off and it was blind in both eyes and had a limp. As I took a photo of it, the wretched thing scurried into a pile of refuse and picked up a chickens foot in its teeth.

We were also almost victim to a jewel scam; a long story but it involved us having a little too much faith that the little Indian man with a scar on his face who stopped us in the street and asked us why foreigners avoid Indian people seemed genuinely interested in us as people and was quite happy to sit and talk about cultural divides with us. He was an artist and tried to sell us his hand drawn Karma Sutra pictures, but apart from this he was nice enough. He told us that he once had a New Zealand girlfriend, 'Stacey,' who was a truck driver from Wellington and had too 'big an ego inside' to make a long term relationship really work. He also told us about his other New Zealand friend, who was prison guard in Auckland. He then made everyone a bhang lassi and asked us how many wives we had.

Several hours later, we went for a beer with the uncle of our new found friend who ended up disappearing and leaving us with the toad-like Brahman uncle and some sort of sleazy nephew in a cheap suit who gave us a packet of cigarettes. Stoned, we half listened them boast about how many million ruppees they made on a weekly basis and that lying was ok if it was done 'for the greater good.' And then the convesation came to its inevitabe conclusion, What about if the two us were to make a quick buck by smuggling some precious jewels back into Australia with us? They talked about loop holes, we looked nervously towards the door and lit another cigarette. No strings attached apparently, except casual tax evasion. The whole situation was made more ridiculous by the fact that we had just spend the day before reading an article in the Lonely Planet (our second copy after our first one was stolen by a man with no teeth on the train to Agra) about how so many stupid tourists still fall for the 'gem scheme.' Hamish had then guffawed but after the incident at hand (which grew quite nasty with raised voices and slamming of hands on the table), he hung his head; we both did. we bought a bottle of whiskey on the way back to our guesthouse.

Tomorrow we head to Pushkar; an apparently beautiful holy place with a holy lake at its centre. Jaipur is rather a fail city; gem scam aside. My bowels are getting edgy with vegetable curry twice a day which is a pity given that it is the best curry I have ever had in my life (and costs virtually nothing). Our hotel, the Red Tomato Hotel Palace is a grand, 'Shining'-esque building, complete with a man throwing up (loudly) at 1am and then again at 6am. I am reading A Fine Balance and Hamish is reading Midnight's Children, token travellers that we are. Still, we sat across from an even more offensive pair of English girls at dinner last night who were both reading John Grisham (The Rainmaker and A Time to Kill respectively) and who sent their malia kofta back to the kitchen in a rage because it was too spicy. Bovved.