todays learnings

• Advance Australia Fair has a difficult second verse.
• They sell jelly beans to kids to raise funds for diabetes research.
• If by the end of Active April you did fifteen activities, you can go online and type them in and download yourself a certificate.
• The latest issue of RACV magazine Royal Auto features an article about Caulfield.
• Hipster is a style of women's underpants.

Active, Passive, Impassive

Attach the prefix in- to an adjective and you make it its opposite. Opportune, inopportune; regular, irregular; passive, impassive. This last pair seem more twin suns than polarities, semantically. To be active is not being passive, when one is inert, submissive, without resistance. But to be impassive is to care not, it's an alternative to being passive without having to take action. A cricket, a reed, a stone.

We unearthed a mole cricket Easter Sunday. It was light rusty brown, with small wings across its back and terrified our son. When he had calmed down enough, we looked a little closer at the cricket as it dug itself back into the dirt. I've moved the polystyrene box its burrow was under; I hope it has found a spot for a new burrow. I've been listening out for singing, but there's been none, and it's been raining besides.

autumn pic

St Kilda Road,
the bluestone barracks
black under Virginia creeper red.
Leaves spatter the walls.
A cordon, arm thick, midway
across a block of stairs.
Is this illegal to photo?

odd one out

Tattoo parlour
Massage parlour
Funeral parlour
Pancake Parlour

Buffalo Bill
Barnacle Bill
Riverboat Bill
Electricity bill

new flavour at the frozen yogurt parlour

Peanut butter.

ice cream

With a drumstick in one hand and a cornetto in the other, both unwrapped, could you tell which one was which?

what footballers eat

On Wednesday I sat in a bakery cafe and read an article in The Age about Gablett Jr's neolithic diet. Sorry, palaeolithic diet. Meat, fish, "birds", nuts, fruit and vegetables he eats, but not dairy, pulses, grains or potatoes. This diet confirms he is the AFL Son of God. While reading I ate a slice of reheated pizza (possibly vego) and guzzled a 600ml carton of coffee-flavoured milk.

In the good old days Stone Age folk didn't eat wheat. They didn't store beans or oils in heavy clay vessels, and they didn't tend cows, or goats, or camels, nor did they milk them. And they didn't eat potatoes. Well not the paleolithic Europeans at least, because those guys hadn't yet sailed across the Atlantic and discovered the Americas. Though palaeolithic Americans must have. Eaten potatoes. If they lived in the tropics. High up in the Andes.

Which begs the question, does Gablett Jr not eat bananas too? What about tomatoes, green beans, corn, capsicum, chilli, AVOCADO? Does the football genius live on beef, birds, cabbage, apples and turnips alone? What about honey? Fat grubs? Nits?

Today for lunch I had half a berry muffin and some red-bean slice this lady from Hong Kong made too much of so I got a couple of pieces - its gelling agent was corn flour - and an instant coffee with milk and one sugar. It was 100% un-palaeolithic.

*

David King is way fatter than Michael Voss. King may be the elder, he may have literally eaten more meals, but he also eats continuously, throughout the day. When he and Voss present their half-time thoughts behind a low desk-like prop, there's always a toasted ham, cheese and tomato panini a-cooling on a custom-built shelf specially installed beneath the desk-like prop. And when the studio cuts back to the Fox Footy panel out comes the lukewarm panini for a quick gobble.

King mentors the younger, slightly slimmer Voss, showing the former Lion how to keep the carb intake continuous when performing live to camera. The duress these men are under to present pertinent, off-the-cuff stats in front of the national pay-per-view audience requires sustained energy inputs. And thus Voss before each show now packs a bag of peanut chikki's in the inside breast pocket of his suit coat, unrelenting in his bid to beef up his screen presence.

chicken ninjas II - chicken ninjas vs the xombies

Chicken ninjas fight off the xombie hordes, who are meerkats. When braindead, meerkats stand upright only and shuffle forwards, their little front paws dangling. The xombies are spelt with an x.

social media is boring

My bank statement arrived in the mail. At the bottom of the page was an invitingly designed invite to visit a website and post questions to the bank's board. I could also vote on the best questions asked and afterwards watch a video of the board answering the top 5 questions 'as voted by you'. Who could be pfaffed?

'The world's most boring social media campaigns' - now there's a good idea for a blog. There's lots of internet advice on how to sell a boring product, and some schmo's published a book Social Media is Bullshit (...but marketing isn't), but it doesn't look like anyone's posting their choice samples of boring social media marketing for all to share and comment. It's a niche yet to be filled, though for some reason I couldn't be pfaffed.

The Schnitz

Chicken ninjas are chickens who are ninjas. They have wings and feathers and their boss is the schnitzel aka the crumbed one. Now for the Google search... It's already a game for your mobile phone, which makes this idea a dud from day dot. Apart from the boss. Oh crumbed one, go the chickens, We deep fry you. Release the parma within.