Billy, in an email this morning:

“I hope your credibility reconstruction project is coming along well.”

Like all my distant, acquaintances-never-quite-confirmed-as-friends, he knows too much. Release the dogs!

The last hurrah … you’re invited! (Click image to view PDF invite)

Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics)

You approach Satan’s wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell.

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished me to the Seventh Level of Hell:

Take the Dante’s Divine Comedy Inferno Test

Our new baby. She’s a cutie, eh?

“Alright people, it’s 1:55 … back to work!”

Regular visitors (do they exist? I cannot say) will notice some small changes to the site “user interface” (I hate that phrase) this morning. Navigation menu now at top of page in tiny font that anyone over the age of 40 won’t be able to read

Apologies in advance for any bugs. Feedback invited, even from HTML wonks who want to look under the hood and tell me it’s wrong, wrong, all wrong…

Changes to the lefthandsidebar (←over there) are also planned, and will bring the site into minmalist splendour… soon.

Back from Uluru. Slide show is online. Essay coming.

We’re off this morning to Uluru, to gaze upon the world’s greatest monolith, to see the stars, visit the centre of the oldest place on Earth and to celebrate, in what can only be described as excessively lavish style, the extraordinary fact that friend Keith has completed forty circuits around the sun.

So there will be no posts for the next few days.

Japanese women are taking to the Beckham hairstyle, according to today’s SMH. And you know I’m not talking about the hair on their heads…

“Some magazines have carried articles about styling your pubic hair and they referred to the Beckham look,” the magazine quoted Minako, an office worker. “But we’d been doing it for a while before those stories came out.”

And this:

“[Beckham's looks] are quite acceptable to Japanese people,” Mr Kiminami said. “It is much easier for Japanese women to accept his moderately sexy appearance than Italian soccer player Francesco Totti, who is too sexy for Japanese women.”

I don’t think Mr Kiminami even begins to comprehend the forces with which he is dealing here.

Haven’t posted for a few days (work+life balance thing) so this is just a “Haven’t posted for a few days but I’m not dead” style of post.

We saw Oliver Stone’s Castro doco on Saturday as previously mentioned. A full house at the gloriously OTT State Theatre and a really fascinating film. The experience has got me thinking about censorship so I’m mulling those thoughts over in the back of my head with the view to writing an essay eventually.

Brent is back up north for the next few days then we’re both off to Uluru on Thursday. Expect photos.

Last night to the Film Festival with Brent, Brent, Aldo, Anna and Michelle for Friday the 13th special horror double feature.

First movie was the premiere of a new Aussie Zombie Alien flick, Undead. There aren’t enough Aussie zombie movies: it’s a genre that needs to be explored more deeply. Nothing like blood, guts and dust in the outback to get the senses moving.

The second film was a classic American effort in the five-kids-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods genre, Cabin Fever. Most of our group seemed to like this one better but I preferred the Aussie effort.

I was even more entranced by the Speirig brothers, the identical twins who directed and produced Undead and who answered questions after the film. Identical twins are always a bit fascinating to watch, and their repeated references to “sharing the same brain” enhanced that.

We’re off this afternoon to see Commandante, Oliver Stone’s bio-doco on Fídel Castro. Gotta love the film festival.

Well-known Aussie heartthrob and paragon of Olde Worlde Catholick Virtue Mel Gibson is in a touch of warm water today after his old man let slip some of the slightly extreme views which pass for conversation around the Gibson dinner table. Mel and [dad] Hutton Gibson have reportedly come under fire from a leading Jewish group for the alleged anti-semitic message of Mel’s new film and for Hutton’s denial that Al Qaeda executed the September 11 attacks.

Apparently the octogenarian Gibson Senior, a former Jeopardy! winner who moved his family from the US to Australia in the late sixties so that Mel wouldn’t have to fight in Vietnam, writes religious pamphlets in his copious spare time. He claims that the Holocaust never happened, that the election of “Anti-Pope” John XXIII in 1958 was forced by a threat to nuke the Vatican, and that the September 11 attacks were carried out by jewish extremists using “remote controlled jets.”

Hutton Gibson “may be considered an eccentric, a crackpot, or an anti-Semite (or some combination thereof) depending upon how charitably one views his utterances and beliefs about religion and politics,” according to the always-reliable snopes.com.

Personally, I can’t understand why anyone still takes that talent-challenged right-wing homophobe seriously at all. He hasn’t made a decent movie since Mad Max II, he treats his wife like a slave and he acts like a complete dickhead in public every chance he gets.

At least now it’s clear where he gets it from.

I re-enrolled at UTS yesterday. This is what my Tuesdays are going to look like from the end of next month:

0647-0940: Train from Newcastle to Sydney (three glorious hours in the company of Cityrail’s finest)

1000-1300: Editing and Publishing 2 (potentially sucky subject but there are eight definitely non-sucky credit points waiting at the end of it)

1300-1600: Political Theory (note the complete absence of any lunch break)

1612-1834: Train from Sydney to Newcastle (at least this train’s a bit faster)

All up it’s roughly twelve hours for the round trip, and I’ll be doing it twice a week (Tuesdays for Uni, Fridays for work). I am being simultaneously realistic (it will be a drag) and optimistic (it will give me ten hours of uninterrupted reading time every week) about this revelation.

I remember years ago when I worked for the Attorney-General we had a staffie who did this trip every day, except with eight hours work, not six, in the middle of the sandwich: he got up at 4 and was home at 8 every day. I asked him once why he didn’t just move to Sydney. He told me living in Newcastle was worth the trip, just for the weekends.

Amen to that.

Awake this morning before dawn. Can’t sleep without my man, even ‘though Melki is the second-best snuggler I know. So I’ve already been up for nearly five hours…

This is a good morning to be up early. I’ve watched the sun rise and it’s going to be a great day. The next edition of PL is all done bar the proofing, after weeks (too many) of slog. It shouldn’t be so hard, but I think it’s a good issue. After processing the last few words this morning I’ve been up at Sydney Park with the boys, who are now sound asleep under my desk after a huge walk and swim. Jasper swam for an hour and would have gone on if I’d let him.

Ran into lovely Tim in the park and chatted while the dogs (his Airedale, my Labs) marauded about. On the way home, across the flawless blue sky, two white cockatoos flew overhead.

Life is good.

Lindsey Browne, who compiled crosswords for the Herald from 1935 and claimed that he had filled more editorial space than any journalist, died yesterday. He was 87. [Full story]

Cryptic crossword fanatics (like me) will miss LB, on Saturday mornings especially.

We have a home. Crosshairs indicate approximate location. We move in a month.

First a confession: I actually slept really well last night without Brent thrashing about next to me. I don’t think one should read too much into this, because I did have company so there were plenty of midnight snuggles and the comfort of a warm body next to me all night. And with Jasper at the foot of the bed it’s possible to sleep despite the noise (that dog snores like a freight train). So I am awake refreshed but still missing my man. Last night was punctuated by a series of telephone calls between here and his hotel room in Newcastle.

Today there is much work to be done so hopefully I’ll be too distracted to notice his absence. Then just one more sleep and he’ll be home, albeit briefly.

He’s gone. It’s only for three days but I already feel lost. I know that after four years together I’m supposed to look forward to breaks like these but every separation is as hard as it ever was. Last night I lay awake in bed; I felt like I had to savour every moment while I still had him next to me. Am I co-dependent, or am I in love? Either way, I’m alone for the next three days and I’d rather not be.

“Le site-blog de Paul Kidd est d’une grande richesse et un design impeccable. Du grand art.”

I am tres reconnaissant for the kind words and trois étoiles awarded to buggery.org by netgai.com. Bienvenue à les mecs français. Ils ont vachement bandant!