Gettin' by

We went to see another show in the comedy festival a few days ago. It was the second show of UK comedian Dan Willis, whose first show we saw a few weeks ago. The man is a workaholic - he was running two one-hour shows on the same nights in venues half an hour's travel from each other. And he only gave himself half an hour between shows.

His first show was more story-telling than belly laughs, but it was enjoyable. His second show, "Ferris Bueller's Way Of," was a much more traditional stand-up show. We went with Ryan and Sara to both. Willis is a good comedian with a very naturalistic stage presence and good crowd control. He shoots down hecklers immediately and mercilessly and asserts his authority over a crowd without being belligerent.

The boys met up for dinner before the show, but Sara and I arrived right before the show was due to start (she had class and I was working WAAAAY the hell out in the 'burbs). The pub was British-style and served food, so we ordered food at the bar before we went upstairs to the room where the comedy was being held. They gave us these plastic things that look like mobile phones and vibrate and beep when your food arrives. We ordered it about twenty minutes before the show was to start, so we figured we'd have it by the time we got upstairs, but it wasn't ready when we were told to go into Willis' room. The room was completely packed full, with people standing. The seats were in straight rows facing forward, rather than with tables as in a normal bar set-up. We were on the inside of a row, about five seats in.

Midway through the set, our plastic food alerts start vibrating and beeping loudly. Willis looks straight at us, thinking it's our mobiles, and says "what did I tell you about mobile phones? Oh, it's dinner..." The entire room then looks at us as we slink out (as well as you can slink past five seated people and a bunch of standing people). Willis continued "why does it take two of you to carry a plate of chips?"

When we got our food from the donwstairs bar, Sara and I weren't sure if we should go back. We were both terrified of being made fun of by the comedian again and were aware that everyone would turn and look at us as we went back to our seats. But there was nothing else for it, so we took deep breaths and braved going back in.

Dan Willis completely ignored us when we came back and kept going with his set. Most people in the audience probably didn't notice us coming back, and our disruption was minimal. My face had been on fire since the beeping thing had gone off, so I was finally able to breathe normally again.

After the show I thanked Willis for not being mean to us on our way back. He was really sweet about it. He said "I was in the zone," looking for hecklers, "and I thought at first 'mobile phones, I'm really gonna get them.' But then I realised it was the dinner things, but I'd already gone there so I had to say something. I know you had to go get your dinner though, I didn't want to make it worse for you."

I'm working all of this week in the city office. Everyone there is lovely and I really enjoy the work I'm doing. I also really like the office - the view is really fantastic, with huge windows all around and a view of the bay on one side and a view of the mountains on the other past the city.

My favourite headline that I wrote this week was for a story about a charity that is taking donated refrigerators and revamping them to make them more environmentally sound and then giving them to low-income families. My headline: "Making refrigerators cool again, and green."


Leslie's been running around for the past two weeks getting two big sets of assignments done. He's got a lot of really ambitious, really creative ideas. They're so ambitious that they take a lot of work and don't always turn out the way the perfectionist in him wants. He's using me as a prop in several, including one for which he took me down to the pier at dawn to stand in a red dress and 3" heels. A short-sleeved dress. And standing on one foot. Now he's not thrilled with the composition, having gotten his film back, so tomorrow morning we're going back to the pier at sunrise to try it again. But when it works I'm sure it'll be great. He really is getting a lot of great stuff. We'll post some eventually if he scans them, but they're all on slide film at the moment.

Our neighbour's cat, Megsy, comes to visit a lot. We know her name because it says it on her collar. She strolls in like she owns the place if we're coming or going. She's a weird cat, though - I tried to give her some tuna today and she didn't eat it. But it's like a little timeshare of a cat, which is about all we can have right now until my job situation gets more stable (and we ask the landlord if we can have a cat of our own).

These two dogs were lying outside a restaurant when we walked down to the beach the other day. The big one had a vest over it, and the little one's face was buried under the vest. I thought it was a cute picture, so now you can see for yourself.

Bringin' home the bacon

Last week I started doing trial shifts at a community newspaper group as a sub. They have two offices, one in the city and one in a suburb about 30 miles from here. I started in the office in the city on Wednesday, and everyone was very nice and helpful. I was very nervous going in, and the person I was there to see (the publisher) was not in, he was at the other office. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, because since he wasn't there to have a preliminary chat with me about what was expected of me and where this might go, I was put straight onto a computer and given copy to edit. Once I had things to do, I was no longer nervous.

They use a text-based programme for the initial word-subbing, and then the copy goes to the designers, who lay it out in InDesign and return it to the subs for a second edit. I am familiar with InDesign, and the whole thing felt like a college excercise. DCU prepared me very well for this kind of work, because it's exactly what we did in class for a year. My internship at Newsday involved a different kind of programme and a different kind of editing, so I was unsure if I was really up to the task. Once there, though, I realised that I am prepared for this and I do know how to do it, and I have no call to be nervous. I may not be a great sub, but I know the basics.

I was there on Thursday as well, and on Friday I went to their suburban office. It is not as attractive for many reasons. The commute (bike to train to bike) is an hour and 45 minutes. The city centre office is on the 8th floor of a building with lots of light and a great view of Melbourne harbour. The suburban office is in a low, squat warehouse by the side of a highway with all the blinds shut and no natural light. They work 4-day weeks, which sounds good until you realise that means two 11-hour days. When you add almost four hours of commuting onto that, it makes for very long days indeed.

But while the aesthetics and shifts are better at the city office, both would be great places to work, and the suburban office is the most pressed for help. They are using a lot of casuals there at the moment, and I would be very happy to do casual shifts at both offices. I'm going back to the suburban office tomorrow and the city office on Monday, Thursday and Friday. Maybe at the end of this week I'll have a better sense of how many shifts I might get from this and what it's going to entail. For now, to use an old newspaper cliche to be avoided in headlines, the future is uncertain.

Last weekend was full of comedy festival stuff. On Thursday night we went to see Ardal O'Hanlon do stand-up. He referenced his "Father Ted" days a few times, and told jokes with the kind of wide-eyed dopiness that makes him such a funny comedian. It was an excellent show.

Friday we went to see PuppetUp!, an improv show using puppets. The show's creative director is Brian Henson, Jim's son, and while the Muppets we all know and love are all licensed to Disney and weren't in the show, these puppets were good too. It worked like a standard intro show - the MC would ask the audience for a situation, a place, a job, a fairy tale, whatever, and the actors would play the scene. Except that the actors were puppeteers who held their puppets above their heads to a video camera, which broadcast the puppets' movements onto two big screens. It was a very strange, and funny, show.

On Saturday night we went to a pub in our neighbourhood with some friends to see a comic we'd seen a teaser for a few nights before. His style wasn't so much belly-laughs as story-telling, but it was a good show and everyone had a good time.

There aren't any pictures with this blog entry with the exception of this spider, sorry. The spider was on the wall above one of the windows in our hallway. The picture isn't taken with a zoom lens - this is how big the spider was. I think it was almost as big as my hand. It's our first encounter with the giant spiders of Astralia, and I'm told they get way bigger than this.

Comedy; intentional and otherwise

This month is Melbourne's Comedy Festival. Every night of the month there are several kinds of stand-up shows or performances going on all over the city. On Sunday we went out to a bar in Brunswick with Ryan and Sara to see something called "Insert Name Here" which promised to be a screening of a bunch of comedy movie shorts all parodying mainstream movies. I'm a little vague on the content because reading the description on the web-site is as close as we got. When we got there, the inappropriately titled "Bar Open" was...closed. We hung around outside for about half an hour with the band who were supposed to be playing later that evening. Eventually someone arrived to open and explained that the guy who was supposed to open at 2pm that day had gotten drunk and forgot all about it. We may go back and try it again next week, phoning ahead this time.

Luckily we had plans for later so we went for dinner and a few drinks before heading back into the city. Every night of the festival there is what they call "The After Party" in the bar at the hotel Exeter. It's basically a two hour show where people who are performing elsewhere during the festival can come and do a 10-15 minute segment from their routine, presumably in the hopes of enticing spectators to come down and pay to see the rest of it at a later date. The show is free and the comics are basically given free drink and the opportunity to promote their show as an incentive. Since the more well established comics don't really need the additional advertisement, you're understandably left with a kind of bottom of the barrel set. It was a very much hit and miss mix, heavily weighted toward the miss. Several of the comics (term used loosely) died painfully, unable to coax more than sympathetic smiles from a cringing crowd. A couple looked on the verge of tears.

Still every now and then there was a decent act that provoked genuine laughter and we were able to get some free tickets for the full show of one of the best. We'll probably see him next week. Ardal O'Hanlon (forever Father Dougal Maguire) is also playing here for about a week. Since he's not really known here, tickets are a lot cheaper than in Ireland. We're going to go see him tomorrow.

In keeping with the comedy spirit of the month, we went to see a double feature of 50’s B movies at the Astor. One of them was Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan Nine from Outer Space and does indeed deserve its reputation as one of the worst films of all time. Apparently actor Bela Lugosi died before Wood had shot more than a handful of scenes with him, none with dialogue or any plot purpose. Undeterred, Wood went on to use the scenes and cast a replacement for the remainder. In a futile effort to conceal the fact that it’s not Bela Legosi, he had him hold his cloak over the lower half of his face for the duration of the movie.

It was a lot of fun though, with cheap sets that fell over when the cast brushed against them, horrendous acting and some unintentionally hilarious dialogue. Police Chief to Sergeant: “It’s murder alright (cue close-up) and SOMEBODY'S RESPONSIBLE!” Incidentally, whatever happened to the term “buster”? Back in the day that was a highly effective insult. Someone needs to bring it back.

Making Plan Nine look like Gone With The Wind, Robot Monster was the second movie in the double feature. Looking for all the world as though it had been shot on location in some one’s back garden it told the story of Ro-Man, (ostensibly a gorilla in a diving-helmet) who came from space to destroy the last 5 people on earth.

Made on a budget that can’t have been much more than $50 and a free gorilla suit, it had to resort to throwing in a lot of stock studio footage to up the excitement. Of course the problem with stock footage is that it may not be that relevant to your movie. But such practicalities obviously didn’t faze director Phil Tucker who clearly wasn’t one to pass up on some footage of rubber lizards wrestling and so, periodically we were treated to some truly bizarre scenes that appeared to have been stolen from the floor of the studio’s cutting room and inserted apropos nothing. In the end someone must have noticed that logic had exited a long time ago and a “Thank God it was all a dream”-ending was tacked on. To be fair it was the only way it would make any sense anymore.

Equally classic dialogue though. In an ill-judged attempt at Shakespearean pathos, Ro-Man, ordered to destroy the female earthling he loves, turns to the camera to exclaim, “I cannot, yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do must and cannot meet? Yet I must, but I cannot.” Beautiful.

Yesterday we went cycled the 30 miles out to Dandenong where Cassidy may be working if she gets the newspaper job that she's been after. The idea was to see how far the work-place is from the local train station (not too far, less than two miles). Today, however, the guy called and said that she'd be trying out in South Melbourne before they decide if they want to move her out there, so it may have been a little unnecessary, but he seemed impressed that she was showing such interest so it probably wasn't a complete waste. Anyway, it's good training for a cycle to Philip Island which we're planning for sometime next week.

Concerning possums

We had some people round last night to go visit our possums (well, they're their own possums, but we like to think of them as ours). Ryan and Lis (pronounced Liz) from Leslie's course came, as well as Ryan's fiancee, Sara. The possums are only three or four minutes away, so they're a great tourist attraction for our neighbourhood. I just hope the council doesn't kill (or "relocate") them as they say they will, because what will we do then on a Friday night?

The possums must have thought all their Christmases had come at once. We brought them three bags of bread rolls and a three kilo bag of apples, and we weren't the only group of people feeding them that night. There is a direct corrolation between how brave a possum is and how fat it is. The skinny ones are the timid ones that you can see up the trees, and the big fat ones come sit in your lap. They don't seem to mind being touched, as long as you give them some food for their trouble. You can stroke them like cats as the nibble away on bread and sit on your lap.

A few words about possums, since a lot of people seem to be horrified that we're getting close to them at all. The Australian possum is not the same as the North American opossum (pictured at right), which seems a nasty little creature. The two are in fact not at all related, though they look somewhat similar and that is what gives the Australian possum its name. "Possum," in North American parlance, is slang for the Virginia opossum. Opossums, when threatened, "play possum," that is, play dead. Australian possums do not exhibit this behaviour - when they are threatened they make a low gutteral growling noise, the sound we heard from them the first night we went to see them. Another thing Australian possums do not do is carry rabies. In fact, no animals in Australia carry rabies - it is a rabies-free country, which is why bringing pets in is so difficult.

These possums seem very friendly and harmless. They play the same ecological role in Australian wildlife as the squirrel plays in European and North American wildlife. The ones in the park down the street from us are friendly and harmless, and there is no cause for alarm.

In temping news, I was at the Department of Justice this week, sorting through 13,000 pieces of paper. I was chatting to the other temp with whom I was working, and she said she'd lived in Paris for nine years. She said she'd met a boyfriend over there, a Scot, and he'd come back to Australia with her. She's been back in Australia for eight or nine years. She spoke of the boyfriend in the past tense, and since she said "boyfriend" and not "husband," I assumed the relationship had not worked out. I asked her if the boyfriend was still living in Australia, or if he'd gone back to Scotland or France. She said no, he had died of a sudden heart attack in their bed less than a year ago and that she had been a complete wreck ever after, and this was her first foray into the working world since then. Boy, did I ever wish we hadn't gone down that road. For the rest of the two days, most things we talked about seemed to bring up memories of him. I said I was sorry to hear about the death, but what else is there to say? It was an uncomfortable situation all round.

If you get the chance, check out Karl Rove rapping at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It is beyond cringe-inducing - it's one of the most horrifying things I've seen in a very long time. I'd like to have a serious talk with whoever thought that this was a good idea.

Nothing much

We don't have much news at the moment, but I'll give you what we've got. Oh, and don't look for the pictures to match the text. There are no pictures that go with this entry, so I'm just rocking up some left-overs from the zoo and other trips.


For myself, I'm still unemployed, or underemployed. I'm still answering the phones (or not - most of these places don't have much phone traffic) at various offices around Melbourne. I heard nothing last week from the guy who called two weeks ago about the possibility of a sub-editing job. I kept calling him to check up on the status, but I got his voicemail three times and left messages. Once I got him and he said he was in a meeting (I gather this was untrue, or else he wouldn't have answered the phone) but would call me back (also untrue).

After more than two weeks and four fruitless phone calls, I was pretty sure nothing was going to come of the offer. But I kept hounding him, more out of stubbornness and the desire that he have to deal with me than from any real hope that I could get anything from him.

Today he called me back. The first thing he said was "I suppose you think I've been avoiding you." I said "The thought had crossed my mind."

He said that he wasn't avoiding me at all, but had been terribly busy. He'd assumed that because of the distance from here to their offices (it's 45 kilometers. There is a train, but no reliable public transport from the train station to their office) that I would probably not want to take the job. But because of my "persistence," he realised that he shouldn't make decisions like that for me, and that I should come in to do a few trial shifts and decide for myself if the commute would be too bad. He says he's very busy this week, being Easter week, but he'll call next week to set something up for me to try out. If he doesn't call me, I expect he knows by now I will call him, so I'm guardedly optimistic.

Perhaps being annoying and pestering this guy might just get me what I want.

Leslie and I went to some friends' of his' house the other day for drinks. They're a couple, Ryan and Sara, and Ryan's in Leslie's course. They're Canadian and have moved to Melbourne about as recently as we have. Sara is doing a Masters in political science at Melbourne University. They're both really interesting, fun and easygoing people, and good conversation was had all round. They're interested in meeting our possums, so I think we're going to have them round soon and they can experience the joys of possum-feeding. It's a cheap way to spend an evening.

Neat trick (and I learned this from Faith, to give credit where credit is due). Go to Google Maps and ask it for driving directions from New York City to Dublin. Read step 23. It's very funny.