on cliches

"People always whinge about the price and the quality of cocaine in Australia as they put half a Jetstar flight to Japan up their nose. Such complaints are a consequence of distance and market size: there simply aren't enough advertising executives in our cities to convince a ring of ass-kicking, goldtooth-grinning, machine-gun-slinging South Americans that a proper drug cartel export to Australia is worth their while."


- Chris Barton at Two Thousand letting down the usually witty and enviable style of the Two Thousand team with this cliched copy.

why planes aren't flying

"...lots of dead people are very, very bad for brand value."

-Ben Sandilands in 'Ashes and angst as airlines navigate holes in the clouds' on Crikey

saturday night slip ups

Me: [to girl in the Kudu Lounge ladies loo with can of hairspray]: Wow, hairspray? I'm impressed!

Girl: Um, yeah, I thought it was a hairspray kind of night

Me: I can't be bothered to bring it out with me

Girl: smiles [dealing very well with my public dissing, upon reflection]

Me: [pause] you know, you look so much like this girl from a band I really like, Bridezilla

Girl: Um, I am the girl in Bridezilla

Me: Oh, wow, well no wonder you look like her. Um, I never would have said that if I thought you really were the girl

Girl: [graciously] I'm impressed you've even seen us

Me:.....[embodying sycophantic creepy slightly drunk girl in stupid shoes, laughing awkwardly] Oh, yeah, at the Annandale, I've seen you a bunch of times!

Girl: Yeah, cool [looks for escape]

Me: Yeah, cool [looks for escape]

"I get into bed and move clear over to the edge and lie there on my stomach. But right away, as soon as he turns off the light and gets into bed, Rudy begins. I turn on my back and relax some, though it is against my will. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel I am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all...
It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it."
-p 4-5, Raymond Carver, Fat, in wil you please be quiet, please?

"I had coped with many of the events in my childhood by pretending that my home wasn’t my home and that its people weren’t my people. One practices this for a while, and before one knows it, one suffers from a perpetual disassociation, or Chronic Tourism."

- William Bowers, All We Read is Freaks on The Rumpus

"I've had three toes shortened - a portion of bone removed between the joints and fixed together with metal rods. I like to wear Jimmy Choo's three-inch heels with a pointy toe."
- Kristina Widmer, 36, New York City in Zed Nelson's 'Love Me' photo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography until April 24.

"I acknowledge that the use of terms like ‘mandatory detention’ may be by and large unavoidable until changes in government policy. But although politicians clearly play an integral part in creating and maintaining biased language around refugee issues, it is by and large journalists who normalise these terms into everyday use, far beyond quoting government policy."

- Maxine Clarke at Overland

"The Web could have been an interactive medium from day one – the technology hadn’t changed one bit – but it took time for people to map out the evolving relationship between user and experience.  The Web, we realized, is not a page to read, but rather, a space for exploration, connection and sharing."

-Mark Pesce, The Human Network

"Every time you buy a Coke, you don't buy a Pepsi."


-p.16 Seth Godin, Permission Marketing

"...but once I stuck headphones in my ears, I found I kind of liked it...normal people tend to keep their distance when you're wearing a Walkman. The outside world suddenly becomes as private as you want it to be."

-p182 David Sedaris, The tapeworm is in, Me Talk Pretty One Day

¨Ask your friends and neighbours and they will tell you that toast is a first class delicacy. It tastes good and has never been the cause of anyone losing their driving licence.¨

- Richard Hamlton, ¨Toaster¨ 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona

''With an evening coat and a white tie...anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilised.¨

- p.12, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

''There is no chance in art, any more than there is in mechanics...A painting is a machine, all the systems of which are intelligable to the experienced eye.''

-Charles Baudelaire, quoted in the Introduction of 'Baudelaire; The Complete Verse' p.21

"...he rejoiced in worldliness, in having some grasp of the inner workings of the world of power and influence, in knowing the gossip, in understanding what low motives actually did make the world turn."

-p.63 M Ignatieff, A Life: Isaiah Berlin

"If you are making money and being productive and raising your standard of living, you're not sitting around thinking Who did this to us? or Why is our life so bad?"

-Michael Dell quoted p. 587, T. Friedman, The World Is Flat

"When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection." And that is exactly what a bow tie says."

-p.57, David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed In Flames

"There is a pathos in television dialogue: the rapid exchange of monologues that fail to find the issue, like ships passing in the night: the reiterated preface, 'I think that...,' as if it mattered who held which opinion rather than which opinion is worth holding..."

-Stringfellow Barr quoted in 'Socrates in America', The Economist p.82 

"The sky was purple, distant. Once the sky touched me. I can't remember where or when that was. But if it touched me once, it might even touch me again."

-p.120, Aamer Hussein, Insomnia

"What dream of freedom and resistance took him up into the air on war's wings?"

-p.94, Aamer Hussein, The Angelic Disposition in Insomnia

"...and then there was that long-drawn cry to Allah that come from the local songs, mixing ecstasy with awful longing, which never failed to rip out something raw from the hollow of my ribcage."

- p.66, Aamer Hussein, Hibiscus Days in Insomnia