Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
My week of Monday 3 to Sunday 9 November 2025 saw me invent a new podcast sub-project, and then manage not to post the two full podcasts I’d planned. For various reasons. Oh well. The rest of it was reasonably productive, so I’m happy with that.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 806: The Kookaburra of Consideration”
In my week of Monday 22 to Sunday 28 September 2025 I moved beyond the stresses of earlier in the month and posted two podcasts, planned a bunch of stuff and wrapped up my 28th crowdfunding campaign. Welcome to spring. And yeah I took another photo of a kookaburra. That kookaburra.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 800: Podcasts finally emerge and that goddam kookaburra is back”
During my week of Monday 25 to Sunday 31 August 2025 I finally rid myself of the random infection which had been plaguing me for the last two weeks. I also picked up a new client, and started mapping out my Spring Surge of work.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 796: Beating the lurgi and scheduling new work”
Two weeks in and I’m still wallowing in the ongoing soap opera that is Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. My week of Monday 14 to Sunday 20 November 2022 saw me waste so much time on that, but I also managed to push some commentary and other media objects.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 651: Ever more schadenfreude, a kookaburra, and an announcement about The 8pm Quiz”
Spring is definitely here, along with hay fever. My week of Monday 19 to Sunday 25 September 2022 saw me create a podcast which immediately became out of date, make friends with a kookaburra, and sneeze a lot.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 643: Making friends with a slicked-back kookaburra as spring destroys my sinuses”[This post is part of the series 50 to 50, fifty posts in the lead-up to my 50th birthday next weekend. Originally intended to be one per day, with the final one on the birthday itself, it’s been disrupted by my work schedule. There will still be fifty posts, eventually, just not one per day.]
One day in early 1966, when I was still five years old, I caught the school bus from the front gate of our dairy farm near Mount Compass and enrolled myself at Myponga Primary School.
Yes, I enrolled myself. My parents were too busy running the farm that day. I can just remember being taken to the principal’s office to answer the questions he needed to complete the enrolment form. Name, date of birth, address, telephone number, parents’ names and so on. I daresay my parents had phoned in advance with most of that stuff, but at the time I felt so very grown up and clever.
I knew my alphabet and could count and do basic arithmetic before I went to school. These days there are kindergartens and pre-schools in the cities and towns, and plenty of kids’ TV programs wherever you live. But who taught me back then? I’m guessing my grandmother — my mother’s mother — who lived with us on the farm. Alas, I have almost no memory of her.
School bored me. All these kids seemed so stupid! They had to be taught their letters and numbers and I already knew all that. Apparently I was disruptive in class. Who knew?
The photo [embiggen] is actually from 1969, when I was in Grade 5 and nine years old. Which kid is me? I’ll tell you at the bottom of this post.
The guy on the top row, sixth from the left with a cheesy grin, is Mark Lorenzetti. Our families were friends. Mark was the same age as me, his youngest brother the same age as mine, and he had a brother in the middle. Like us, they had a dairy farm, though theirs had plenty of irrigated land and was clearly far more productive through those droughts of the 1960s. I reckon our dogs were smarter than theirs though.