If you are just starting out on a career in the blogging world, head this piece of advice: never blog drunk. God knows what might happen.

The odd thing about yesterday’s post is the absolute and complete lack of alcohol or any other stimulant. I was sober, stone-cold stober.

Odd.

Moving on….

Beki’s musical challenge
A couple of days ago on Beki’s blog, she asked, nay demanded, all concerned to answer a couple of personal questions vis a vis one’s taste in music. I would never dream of denying Beki a thing, even now she’s flounced off up to Sydney. So here goes:

1. Name your all time favourite song that you will never get sick of
   Song to the siren by Tim Buckley
2. List the ten songs that would make the “sound track of your life” i.e. your other favouritist songs that are not your bestest ever
   I shall be released - Bob Dylan
   So real - Jeff Buckley
   There she goes - The Las
   Famous Blue Raincoat - Leonard Cohen
   Shiloh town - Tim Hardin
   Down by the seaside - Led Zeppelin
   The same deep water as you - The Cure
   Road - Nick Drake
   God only knows - The Beach Boys
   Blackbird - the Beatles
3. he one song that you love but are too embarrassed to admit it to anyone (and now I’m making you admit it to anyone). The more embarrassing the better
   We have all the time in the world by Louis Armstrong.
   I think it comes from the soundtrack from some 60s James Bond film. That being said, I think it’s way cool, no matter what anyone else says.

Question 2 was pretty much songs picked at random. There are a whole lot more that could make the list on another day. I also excluded classical music, just to make it easier.

Running
11km this afternoon. It was windy and unpleasant. So was the weather.

I’ll have you know all you jeerers and jokers, you makers of glib remarks and producers of cheap laughs at the expense of me and my cardigan, we (the cardigan and I) have been a great success.

Yes, the cardy has made its public debut to great acclaim. Beautiful women stopped and stared. Gay men whispered to their fag-hag friends. Hormonal teenage girls fainted clean away to the Eastland floor. Grown men rushed, breathlessly, to their nearest purveyor of fine couture, begging for a cardigan as fashion-forward as mine.

To no avail, of course. The essence of cardigan wearing, as I’m sure you know, lies in the wearer himself. A true cardigan wearer has style, panache, aplomb. Like me. Sure, my wonderful bone structure and natural, feline, athletic grace comes in handy too, but it’s mainly my masculine charisma that does it.

You either got it, or you don’t.

And if you don’t got it, you can’t buy it.

Running
12 point something ks around the streets near my joint last night. I am disappointed to report no encounters with our canine friends. I was prepared last night; ready to give as good as I got to any little mutts that dared to cross my path.

In a moment of weakness yesterday, I bought myself a cardigan. It seemed cheap, and the mannequin looked pretty cool, standing on a podium with his hip stuck out a rakish angle.

Now, however, I’m racked with uncertainty. The mannequin could carry it off but he was about 6 inches taller than me AND he had no head. Will it look okay on me? Will I just end up looking like my Grandad, or worse?

So, help me out. Can cardigans be cool?

Cooking
No time for runnning at the moment, but plenty of time for things culinary. Yesterday’s dinner was a home-made chicken, asparagus and leek pie followed by tarte tatin. Both were well received.

God damn all snappy little dogs. Double damn yappy-type dogs who lurk behind trees at night time and spring out at you with no warning. Triple damn dogs with a taste for runners’ left ankles.

Last but not least: a pox on dog owners who can’t be bothered locking up their mutts at night.

There were harsh words spoken tonight, and they involved the canine species, as you might guess.

I have a feeling the thing was a whippet - skinny, small and white, but it was hard to say in the darkness. If so, right now it’s a whippet that should consider itself very fortunate it doesn’t have a Brooks-shaped bruise on its backside.

Running
16km around the streets near my place. It felt fast, but that’s because I’m super unfit at the moment. Still, it was good to get a decent run in for once. Here it is on mapmyrun.com.

… by which I mean - it’s in no danger of being burnt up by my amazing turn of speed. I have run, finally, but it weren’t awful fast.

(Apologies - I went all slack-jawed yokel there for a minute.)

It was 9.3km and I did it in just over 40 minutes.

The ever-fascinating Jojo claims to be the unfittest person on the planet. Well, she knows best I suppose, but I must be a close second.

Still, a run is a run. And there’s another one scheduled tomorrow, always assuming I manage to get the kids’ nap times in sync.

Spam
The WordPress “Akismet” spam filter thing is an extraordinarily overzealous beasty isn’t it? It’s good to have, otherwise I’d get about 30 comments a day from people trying to sell me car insurance. However, for some reason they’ve taken a dislike to comments from Em. This is not the first time.

Em - you’re not trying to sell me insurance are you?

I’m on leave at present, looking after assorted babies and wives and the like. All good fun. One of the side benefits of all this is having a lot more time to catch up on day-time TV, a pleasure I only indulge in rarely.

I must say this: you get some RIGHT FREAKS on TV during the day.

Take this guy: Peter Everett

According to the Channel 10 website:

Although he counts cooking as a major hobby (he makes a great Thai salad) Peter is not a chef. He therefore “de-jargons the chef-speak”, asks lots of questions, and generally acts as a link between the audience and the professional chefs, making the show both extremely entertaining and educational.

Reading between the lines, he knows absolutely nothing and spends the show arsing about making a fool of himself.

Then there’s Dr Phil, whose voice and moustache is more annoying than his guests could ever be.

Oprah was semi-interesting today. She made a very serious point that (to paraphrase) a man’s worst fear is that a woman will laugh at him; a woman fears a man will kill her.

It sounds insightful, but it’s not true.

A man’s worse fear is that a woman will make him watch the Bold and the Beautiful.

This show must have been on for 10 years? 20 years? I’m not sure. They don’t seem to have changed at all. I swear I remember watching the show at high school and thinking Brooke was a bit of all-right.

They’ve obviously saved money by keeping the same actors and just pumping them full of more and more botox. This woman below is about 60% botox and 30% silicon. She doesn’t look at all human. It’s scary, and not just because she’s supposed to be “battling with alcoholism”.

And they call me strange for wanting to run marathons?

Good old Catherine Deveny knows just what to say. Here she is today on Sam Newman, the Footy show and the Logies:

The guys who sit by rolling their eyes saying “Oh Sam!” are just as bad. The show should be called “Pigs in Suits”.

Has Kate Ritchie broken new ground in creative endeavour, challenged outmoded cultural stereotypes or questioned the human condition? Is she brave? Is she smart? Is she funny? No, she’s been on Home and Away for 20 years. And she’s pretty. What a good girl.

Which reminds me: I must tell you one time about the year I was at the Logies.

Hail
Those of you who come from cool climates will no doubt think me something of a naif, or possibly a rube if you prefer, but I did get a touch excited to see my backyard under hail recently. It was almost like snow!

Sick
I’m feeling a touch better, thanks for all your kind comments. My voice is coming back slowly. Yesterday I sounded like Tom Waits after a particularly intense bender, today it’s more like early-60s Bob Dylan. I can sing a mean “Ballad of Hollis Brown”.

Jaykay - I didn’t take my lurgy in to work - I kept it at home with my two young kids and wife. Nice eh?

I desperately, desparately, DESPERATELY, DESPERATELY!!!!!!! want to run, but I probably should wait until I can keep down food.

Cast your mind back into the dim dark past, back as far as… erm… yesterday. I believe I mentioned something about a slight cold. Something along the lines of a sore throat.

I may have been stretching the well-known JH talent for understatement to its limit there. I don’t so much have a cold as a full-on infection. When the friendly local GP inserted the tongue depressor, jimmied open the jaw and cast a professional eye tonsil-wards, he gasped. I kid you not: he gasped.

It was some seconds before he could reassemble his ironic detachment, before grumbling something along the lines of “that’s an impressive throat you’ve got there.” Believe you me, that’s not a compliment.

So, a dose of antibiotics is in order. Joy. Bliss.

In the meantime, I’ve been left sounding like a ouija board that can talk. No, I’m more breathy than that. A ouija board with a voice, standing in the middle of a hurricane.

It’s amusing, but not terribly helpful when you’re trying to restrain a two year-old running rampant in Eastland.

Ronaldo
Can I just say quickly, can everyone please lay off Ronaldo?

I’ve said for years that he’s a fat, overpaid, over-the-hill, lazy son of a… - well you get the drift - but no-one seemed too worried about that.

But one drunken encounter with a trio of Brazilian transvestites and everyone jumps down his throat.

Let’s be honest here: who amongst us hasn’t, at one time in our lives, spent some quality time in a cheap motel with three or more cross-dressing Brazilians?

I have a fairly horrid cold at the moment and it’s not doing much for the kid-wrangling efforts. There’s some sort of evil gremlin in the back of my throat, running about jabbing things with a red hot poker. The little bugger.

I suppose it could be worse. Read this:

A fire has broken out at one of India’s largest chilli markets, burning hundreds of thousands of pounds of chilli peppers and covering the nearby area with a cloud of stinging smoke.

Residents and officials say the burning chilli smoke has stung the eyes and throats of people across the city.

“People are coughing uncontrollably,” says farmer Y. Venkateshwarulu.
Source: theage.com.au

Yeah, no shit.

If, recently, you have read or, god help you, written a blog on wordpress.com recently, you will have noticed an “improvement”.

The boffins at WordPress headquarters have come up with some sort of system that inserts links to related posts at the bottom of every blog. V helpful, those boffins. In fact, if you’re a blogger, you don’t even have to do anything - it just appears!

I’m not too happy about it, actually. If I think there’s a related post somewhere, I will link to it via the magic of the hyperlink.

To paraphrase some long lost political figure, “I will decide the possibly related posts, and the way they come here.”

So, I’ve turned the “new feature” off. If you would like to turn yours off too, see the instructions below:

Definitely related post:
How do I disable “possibly related posts”?

Running
None. I’ve been too busy kid-wrangling and all that sort of stuff. I can’t think when I’ll have the chance in the immediate future. Dang.