Our little cosmos

As miracles go
This one's worthy of the world
Our little cosmos

War correspondent

A nomenclature:
Nom de plume: Lamentation
Nom de guerre: Laughter

Bourgeois Brush Work

Loose-linen-wearing
Frangipani brush workers
Smeared in the good oil

Exen

Toward the entrance
Spied in a dark uniform
Exiting slowly

Amaze-on

The shipment arrived
Unpackaged inside an hour
A ticking time bomb

Mutual Interment

She lunged at me
Hovering over a hole
We died together

Incessant

The escape in flames
I call out to my maker
"I worked for your dad!"

Old men are okay

Lifetimes of wisdom
In the flit of a fantail
Or it's wary eye

Rockhampton Confidential

Jejune? Assuage?
We cannot know what they mean
Til the flood subsides

Idio could be your temper

Another language
Explained to me in time
I'll never recall

The other tennis champ

Behold the father
His incontinent rages
Signalling no end

Charity begins

Then there were the ones
Who staged everything
For want of humour

They're not done

Circumlocution
I'll explain what it means when
You pop round the back

Just let it. Just.

When it moves forward
Don't tell it anything lest
It move back again

Multo mutlo multo

Serendipity
In ripe fields of rhyme before
Tell-e-vision

Bully beef

Ruminations
Ease the uneasy message
Your memory licked

Old Man Sym

Fortune's grave
Raided by the grieving crowd
For purity's sake

Nothing escapes the T Man

Suspense building
Not made easy with taxed
Unexpectedness

God knows

Keeper of the frog
Turns brown with croaking "what what"
For all he is worth

Fermented rhymenorreason

Four thousand missed calls
Gathered at a smart hotel
Daring another

Foreground noise

Tired sentiment
Crawling under my pillow
Escaping the night

Market day

Rain smeared stop sign
Surrenders this one morning
To five four three two

Simian song

Solitarily
Inconsequentially
Mano a mano

Geelong, I suppose

Forgotton tu-tu
Last spotted colourlessly
In an open drain

This man... (not me me)

...is not afraid of midlife. His crisis began at 21 anyway. And his life since these difficult years? It has been a slow, inexorable transfiguration. He has become a cliche, a self-parody, a man without spiritual bearings other than those that glance at him, and then ignore him, in the timber aisle at Bunnings.

A man whose infinite ineffectualness and heavily impregnated inner
urban martyrdom make him a popular salve for middle class insecurity.

A man who would love to be addicted once more to cigarettes and dishonest hotel stories, so that his teeth might regain thier colour and his eyes their pathetic glaze.

A man who would crash his friend's motorbike and suffer Good 'Ol Boy exploitation without justice or sense. Who would fly to the tropical North to recite meaningless poetry to his father and his father's would-be.

Minestra di verdura

She said he walked like a drunk, his legs were plaited
And left

Alone with him, he spoke like a hammer, his hands were thumping
He sang like a pipe, his throat smoked
He laughed like minestra di verdura!
And then left

At First Gloomily

Glutenous somnolence
Tendril drags falling away from night's spine
Neither now nor then
Our accumulated algal drifting
Toward the whir of day

Kevin Andrews for PM

Throughout most of his university years, Australia’s newly-elected Prime Minister was assistant to a well known Melbourne undertaker. His style was idiosyncratic. He would remove all of his clothes before dressing the day’s corpses in a variety of pantomime costumes. One of his workmates at the time alleges he tampered with the elder pauper corpses, the ones he dressed as Robert Menzies. After a lacklustre career in law and theatre restaurant acting, he made a name for himself co-designing two key Howard government policies: the Pacific Solution and WorkChoices.

Long Legs (The Reprisal)

Thought I'd Just Mention

Thought I'd just mention.

Gadarene Swine

via Laudator Temporis Acti

In all exorcisms except one, Jesus simply expelled the demons. But at Gadara (or Gerasa or Gergesa), Jesus sent the demons into a herd of pigs. Matthew 8.30-32 (cf. Mark 5.11-13 and Luke 8.32-33) wrote:

And there was a good way off from them a herd of many swine feeding. So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine. And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

(The poor creatures. What did they do to deserve that?)

Softening Bishop's Landing.

Oh dear. The OZ is trying to whip up a plagiarism scandal by claiming that Kevin Rudd in his recent Monthly essay used the same quotes (of Nicolas Sarkozy and Wang Qishan) as Roger Altman in January’s edition of Foreign Affairs. These quotes were, of course, properly referenced.

For the benefit of the paper's chief political correspondent, Matthew Franklin (the whipper) here is the OED definition of plagiarism: “The action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own.”

Repeat: passing it off as one’s own.

(Ah, they’re up to their old tricks again, adopting the “tarred with the same brush” spoiler strategy that worked so poorly for them during the 07 campaign (their assumption being that most people can’t make the distinctions required to separate, for example, plagiarism - bad- from coincidental quoting - not bad).)

Evolving Uncertainty

Interesting that a quarter of the Bulgarian population is “not sure” about the validity of evolution theory. What is it about Bulgaria that inspires so much uncertainty?

This Wiki-snippet doesn’t help:

Most Bulgarians (82.6%) belong, at least nominally, to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the national Eastern Orthodox Church. Other religious denominations include Islam (12.2%), various Protestant denominations (0.8%) and Roman Catholicism (0.5%); with other denominations, atheists and undeclared totalling approximately 4.1%.

But the recent emergence of “one of Europe’s most bitter [theological and political] schisms” involving the pre- and post-communist Bulgarian Orthodox Church might offer a clue.

Ho Chi Sin

Good to see David Clarke is keeping the communist threat at bay in NSW. At an invite-only preview of an exhibition called Viet Nam Voices hosted by Liverpool Council on January 29, the uninvited Opus Dei operative is alleged to have thrown a “temper tantrum”. The details are unclear, but it seems a group of Vietnamese protestors, offended at a “pop art depiction of Ho Chi Minh”, asked Mr Clarke to act on their behalf and shirt front a few curatorial and council staff.

(Oh, the tawdriness!)

Look out Barry O’Farrell. If it isn’t the communists stalking around behind you, it’s David Clarke.

Recall

The Howard Years should not be available to minors. An article in this month’s issue of Science cites the work of a team of Brisbane-based pediatric neuroscientists who have discovered a dangerous link between mental illnesses such as depression and dysthymia and exposure to any information related to John Howard. This is only evident among children aged between 3 and 16.

Nook

Oughtn't we cross the lough?

In a section titled Irregular spelling in a chapter titled How we write and spell in a book titled How Language Works, is this: "Though the rough cough and hiccough plough me through, I ought to cross the lough".

listen

Joe Hockey the Barbecue Clown Part III

We pick up the story of Joe Hockey the Barbecue Clown at the point where Joe, confident that the kangaroo patties he has laid out on the grill can be left to cook unsupervised for a few minutes, refastens his Deutsche Bank apron and resumes drinking from a large bottle of beer.

Joe Hockey: Well, there we go. Whooee!
Neutral Bay Battlers: ...
JH: Oh come on. Look. Take this and smash the pig.
NBB: ...
JH: It's a three iron. A Ping. Swings like a dream. Whack the pig and get a handful of shibboleths.
NBB: ...

Joe Hockey the Barbecue Clown Part II

In Part I of Joe Hockey the Barbecue Clown, Joe became distracted whilst cooking some chops and sausages for his constituents. Subsequently, the sausages burnt.

Joe Hockey: Okay. We've lost them. Sorry.
Neutral Bay Battlers: Boo!
JH: More Labor taxes.
NBB: ...
JH: Carbon.
NBB: Boo!
JH: So let me see what else is in the esky.
NBB: Yay!
JH: ... (rummaging) ...
NBB: Boo!
JH: What?
NBB: ...
JH: ...
NBB: Yay!
JH: ... (rummaging) ...
NBB: ...
JH: Ah-Ha! Roo patties.
NBB: ... Y ...
JH: Eh? Oh Christ, the chops are burning.