Tuesday, March 07, 2006

The beginning

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the world's 28 millionth blog. Of course this number is irrelevant because my blog is different. So no threat of obscurity there. Exactly how it is different, however, is yet to be discovered, but I believe in predeterminism, or did, so I'm confident I've got something to share that 27,999,999 other blogs haven't thought of yet.

Anyway, it would be great if you could spend a weekend carefully reading and re-reading everything written here, but I accept that you may be busy and unable to afford such a commitment. So please stay for as long as your peanut butter toast stays warm or until any pity you might have towards an insecure wannabe writer (not me) dissolves.

Most of what will follow, I have no doubt, will be fairly silly. Silliness is the zeitgeist that never really budges. It is the spirit of all times that sits there just beneath the surface of our political and social lives like an occasionally-loved fez in the costume trunk, inspiring people to behave in odd ways and say unexpected things. Often funny things, too. Pauline Hanson is a good example, except she went to prison which wasn't that funny (for her). Another one is iffy interpretations of our national story. Take those Australian flag endraped boys and girls at Anzac Cove last year. What history were they mindful of while blitzing out, beach-side, in the company of the Bee Gees? Stayin' alive indeed!

There is a problem for people who wish to combine silly observations with not-so-silly observations, and it's all about credibility. Clive James once mused -- and I'm paraphrasing shamelessly here -- that whimsical writing is hard to take seriously, even if it is satirical and has a deeper significance. But I don't care about that. Animal Farm was cute and charming and I'd happily read it to John Howard's grandchildren - if and when they arrive.

One last thing: this blog's name is not supposed to be that clever because though I speak moon it's a dying idiom and I'm not particularly taken by language history, less so astronomy. In fact, without wanting to generalise, the language of the universe, as well as its origins, is passe.

There is something in it though. Read on to see if you can detect traces of the ancient tongue amid a sometimes gentle sometimes raucous always transmuting cosmos of words, meanings and pretentiously surreal waffle masquerading as tasty allusions to god-knows-what (and he's promised never to tell).