The Right Man In The Right Place Two Months Late

While sipping tea in the dark and skimming the morning papers with the aid of a novelty glowing keyring from a sports bar, I see that this person is no longer in need of a public relations consultant. (I can't do any better than Tim Blair's headline.)

I had been more or less counting on the job, but will turn my attention to the classifieds with a light heart. You have to expect certain setbacks. Although not, perhaps, the ones that befell Mr. Brogden.

Sydney Off Balance

As Hutton arrives in the US, I depart, in order that the number of English people in said great republic remain constant. You (as a nation) have to be careful about this sort of thing, otherwise you wind up having to contend with the Minutemen.(Imagine me making a tired pun about the Revolutionary War or Mike Watt at this point, as I can't be bothered.) The number of English people in a country is one of those delicate karmic balances that you mess with at your peril.

Not that I'm going to go back when Hutton leaves, or anything; I don't particularly like to travel.

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be much point maintaining the rather flimsy "undisclosed location" affectation, especially since all I've been able to do for the past several months is bitch about how difficult it is to get rid of all my worldly possessions and move to Australia. I am, finally, there. The precise city must go unnamed, though... although there's a big harbour... and an opera house... oh, fuck it.

Aesthetics Of Disaster Relief

Everyone is still shouting at everyone else about the inundation of New Orleans. To be sure, there's plenty of blame to go around: failures of local, state, and federal gov't in quick succession, etc, etc. But I don't think anyone has started taking random pot-shots at charitable organizations yet.

It's not much, but I can get the ball rolling: the first Red Cross TV spot to begin running, about a day after it became clear that things were going comprehensively pear-shaped on the Gulf coast, consisted of a sober montage of black-and-white pictures of devastation and human suffering along with a number to call and pledge donations. No problems there. Then, however, some genius decided to jazz things up a bit by having Johnny Cash accompany the misery, singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water".

I think they pulled it off the air fairly quickly, but still, for Christ's sake. We can only be thankful that the Man in Black never covered "When The Levee Breaks".

Life In A Box

I have become yet another home of randomly-broken silence. This is a good thing, unless you are interested in stories about the three-year-old dust formations my apartment suddenly turns out to be full of. Some of them spell out words, but fortunately none of them have instructed me to kill yet. Only a matter of time, I suppose.

Australia soon. I am still nursing my almost complete ignorance of the place. However, apparently cricket is popular in Australia, and England recently won something called the Ashes. (The name is familiar, and I'm sure I have some deep-rooted cultural memory of what the fuck the Ashes are, but it too is packed in a box somewhere.) On the one hand, I won't really be able to get into the spirit of triumphalism, because cricket may be the one sport I care about less than baseball - on the other, this will hopefully pay dividends in terms of not getting punched in the face. It's a delicate balance of costs, benefits and clouds of sentient dust over here.