The Gap Between The Pauses

You'll recall that three weeks ago we brought you the tale of the Stationary Travelator at Garden City, Booragoon.  And sure, the moving tale of a non-moving incline is not everyone's idea of a story, but the actual importance of the items reported in this 'blog is more or less given away by the title Mr Trivia's Tract . No one is going to accuse us of false advertising. I'm sure you can read the above sign, but for those of you who already have "tl:dr" flashed up in your cartoon eyeballs, here's the gist. It will take 26 weeks to manufacture a new travelator.  Half a year, people. You and your Significant Other can get to work on a conceiving a child this afternoon and be well into the second trimester before Garden City finishes its new people mover. You'll be deciding whether the names Jaydren, Baylinn and Robespierre are too posh or bogan for the new baby, before a single shopper in Melville district is moving up or down on those steely, ...

I was talking with friends while purchasing bed linen. Inexpensive linen. Kmart’s Homebrand. My attention wasn’t fully on the task at hand. I thought I had bought a sober black and grey set. Many of you are shuddering now, but I have no problem with the idea of living in a house of black, white and stainless steel surfaces. Reflective, metallic surfaces, glass and recessed–lights – the future as seen from 1979 is what I'm shooting for. And as long as I had a chromed robot called Vacxy to clean those surfaces, I would be as happy as Larry. Larry Fortensky. It wasn’t until I prewashed the linen that I realised the 30% drop off in my attention had led me to choose a rather more ‘shiny’ bed set than I had anticipated. Shiny metal and glass–good. Shiny quilt cover–bad. As you can see in the photograph, there’s a circular “motif” on the pillow cover. The fake satin look of the quilt cover is unnecessarily garish. It might be okay for costuming an Earth, Wind and Fire tribute band, bu...

Thankfully they haven't offended me by suggesting that this checkout was somehow barred to me.  My purchase experience hasn't been negativized with the harsh and ugly "Checkout Closed" signs they used back in the dark ages. The Coles brand is a safe space where a sign informs me that should I allow for the possibility, there are others, somewhere, who are ready to take care of my shopping needs. I like this about as much as a letter from my bank that tells me how much better off I will be when they change a system that was working fine for me, into something that will work better for them, usually at my expense.  Doublespeak is Dooubleplusgood!

Occasionally I read articles that are collections of workplace tips. Perhaps 5 percent of these articles offer useful material, the remainder are poorly researched, use questionable photgraphic material and are filled with bleedin’ obvious advice that can only be useful to those who have never set foot in a workplace. (A 2005 MIT study reveals that of this group 75% will become undergraduate filmmakers of whom 95% will go on to make a short film about the soul-destroying nature of the workplace.) With this in mind, I determined it was time for me to write my own poorly researched, generic workplace tips. So here goes. 5 Generic Workplace Tips 1. Dress Four Success A 2007 study commissioned by the Australasian Institute of Fashion Design reveals that four is the correct number of items of apparel one should wear in an office workplace. This quartet should include some form of upper body covering, lower body covering and one or two items of underwear.  Obviously there is so...

I am confident that the good folk over at The Worst of Perth will have looked into this, but I couldn't find a mention of this over there. Not that I searched for more than a couple of minutes; their site is dense with Perthcentric gold. Have a look some time. Anyhow, when I was a kid, Transperth–then the Metropolitan Transport Trust–ran a campaign encouraging Perthites to take the bus. There was a jaunty tune which sadly I cannot reproduce here and a sprightly lyric which went something like this: We are the wheels of Perth City Leave the driving to us We are the Wheels of Perth (Take it easy) Come on and take the bus! There was even a mascot for all of this, an actual MTT bus driver nicknamed "Jimmy". This is something like thirty years ago, but my memory has him as John Denver looking fellow. And if you don't know who the late John Denver was - ask your grandfather. I believe Jimmy's brief was to be friendly; being a child at this time, I found t...

Garden City's travelator has been broken for weeks. They've even had a nice sign made. The Travelator is on an incline, so it's like a lazy escalator. And of course a stationary travelator is a shiny metallic grooved ramp.

Recently, a Facebook friend described herself as an 80s kid. This made my brain blink for a moment because I have always thought of myself as such. However, in my case it means I was teenager during the 1980s, rather than being born during this turbulently day-glo era. So, I'm not going to get into an ownership tussle. If someone wants to claim a decade in which they were a embryo, so be it. Based on that reasoning, I claim Woodstock and the Moon Landing. But back to the 1980s. No one better defined the decade for teenagers (the other 80s kids) than American filmmaker the late John Hughes. He of SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984), THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985) FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (1986) and PRETTY IN PINK (1986). He also made more adult oriented fare such as TRAINS PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES (1987) however somewhere along the line he became the go-to guy for family films like HOME ALONE (1990) and DENNIS THE MENACE (1993). He stopped directing after CURLY SUE in 1991, but wrote numerous scr...