GRANTHAM: Well may she say ‘(Society), there is no such thing’, but enlightened society will never forget her moment of nonsense: Payton L. Inkletter.

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

In other news…

04^th May 2009:

Monday: The Sheila Monster woke me at half ten, and then began a busy time getting ready to take Bob swimming. The alabaster alligator decided to go and do a quick bit of opportunistic Op Shopping short of dropping before I needed to leave for Guildford, so she picked up Pa pree about midday, and zoomed off. I managed a cowboy watering of the bamboo on yet another dry warm sunny late autumn day, then got on the phone to Optus and upgraded to the $129 unlimited ‘yes’ Fusion plan, as I spoke of the likelihood of doing here some days back, last week in fact.

My billions of daily readers, being mindful of the twin facts that this is a non-PC zone and that some of my best friends are wogs, will not be shocked that I am moved to share that yet again Optus, after navigating their hopeless and frustrating digital filtering greeting maze, put me through to a wog called MayAnn on an overseas line, which played havoc with my ears, me cochlear doodahs, straight away, both because MayAnn obviously has English as her second language, and the lower quality of the international line; oh to speak to Australians always, like the good old days! MayAnn was a very sweet wog, but a wog nevertheless, yet the gal did her best to hear me through with my complaint-suggestion for her honchos regarding the unavailability of the means to block the excluded call types on this ‘unlimited’ plan. The long and short of it is that from midnight Wednesday night we will have 30 Gb of high speed download monthly throttling thereafter to 256 kbs, and unlimited calls to virtually all numbers in Australia for a total of $129 monthly. I have become addicted to the speed, for it allows me to research all the million things daily that I need and want to know without waiting sometimes minutes for a page to load at dial up speeds. On an average day I would load a hundred pages at least, sometimes several hundred, from word and expression meanings, to history, to biographies, to scientific and nature subjects, to television shows and current affairs program sites, to a thousand things (this generation is very spoilt with the amount of information we can access in seconds), some very data heavy. Even my Main Page takes minutes to load on dial up. Telstra didn’t bother to get back to me in two weeks of asking, other than to finally direct me to a web site of their deals by email, so they lost their chance to win us back (and their salesman had hassled Janny for our business, to which she said come back and talk to the lesser half, which he didn’t).

So the beautiful bobtail arrived back, alone – amazingly – just before I got out of the shower, having had a successful hunt and kill at a couple of Op Shops, and then I kissed the delectable dragon goodbye and zoomed off to Guildford on yet another day from Edentia: balmy, dry, sunny (yet we so desperately need soaking rain! Now our Gnangarra Mound groundwater resource, the source of 60% of Perth’s potable water, is not replenishing fast enough…).

I am nowadays more than a little solicitous driving past Guildford Grammar on Terrace Road, where in March I copped a $75 fine for recklessly speeding at 48 kmh in a 40 kmh school zone. To be honest, I find I miss the signs all the time, but if they could be electronic and flash, like the amber jobs on the highways in advance of the impending red traffic lights, I’d be laughing, because I’d notice them. I bring this up because some weeks ago I read of one pretty little hoon, Amira Zamir, featured in April 19’s Sunday Times, who was fined $1000 for doing 160 kmh on Alexander Drive not far from here. She was quoted as saying, after seeing the Vin Diesel movie ‘Fast & Furious’, ‘The way they speed and stuff, it makes you want to try the things and be adventurous.’ Well Amira, you want adventure, try 48 kmh in a 40 kmh zone, with not a school kid in sight. Better still, accompany an ambulance or police crew and attend fatal accidents, and smell the blood and guts, and hear the screaming. Can you blame the average decent citizen who drifts above the limit slightly, but is still in complete and safe control of his vehicle, for wishing that rather than fining tens of thousands of us annually, far more resources were devoted to catching these recklessly dangerous types?

Bob was again caught by surprise to see me ‘early’ at 2.10 p.m., and we shot off (slowly and responsibly) to Swan Aquatic, passing said Guildford Grammar along the route, to have Bob put in a very good innings in the quiet pool. He tickled me with a remark near the clock tower in Midland central when I asked him if he knew why I phoned his social trainer yesterday on Sunday: “I don’t want to know, anyway!” I wrote furiously for most of the time at the pool in long hand notes for my ‘small’ dissertation for The Babies concerning enlightened nationalism, that is, the wholesome concern for and support of one’s nation as one’s greater family.

Bob and I finished with a walk near dark at Fish Market Reserve back at Guildford, before our cup of tea at the same picnic table we’ve patronized for the past umpteen years. On our walk along the river bank we were treated to something wonderful: two big dolphins were cruising along, probably fishing. And this spot is about a million miles upriver from Fremantle and the ocean, so I wonder did they plan to go much further still? They were at times fifty to a hundred metres away, but their outbreathing was very audible, bless their slippery socks.

I got fuel at Altone Road Caltex on my way home, and the chalcedony chameleon kindly let me collapse in front of My Beloved while she delivered vittles to the hoary old monitor lizard. Today’s Australian news was all about the white and wong of it, given the Government’s alteration of their proposed emissions trading scheme legislation. Our Federal Minister who’s always wong, Penny Wong, Climate Change Minister, was standing behind Kevin Ludd perusing the journos, with that penetrating glare-gaze of hers, for candidates for water torture.

Kerry the Great, on his The 7.30 Report, scored an interview with Ms Wong, and, trifles aside like the fact that Kezza’s tie matched that thing on his head, it is amusing to see Mistah O’Brien grill the reds, when he’s a red himself (some of my best friends are reds, one of whom shares my beds), whose main job when he’s got a fellow Marxist on is to try to pull off a convincing job of impartiality, and roast the bastard. And that penny who’s always wong is a study in not being pushed around, even by the big man himself.

I rushed to the pootah with a mug of mocers coffee that the crotchety crocodile made me, and tried to do a tad of writing in between the fusillade of gabchuck she fired at me while dressmaking a few feet away. My word that woman can talk! Can talk both the back legs off of a Border Liecester. I was so weary I asked her next to tuck me in for a couple of hours of shuteye, which she did, and when the deleterious dragon woke me just before half ten for my nightly dose of Lateline I was deeply asleep and dreaming, in which, no joke, Pa pree was doing a very strange and funny dance around the Swift, parked in our drive, and then hugged Janny.

Tony SilverToes Jones looked most dapper as he interviewed Andrew Robb, the Opposition's spokesman on emissions trading, and I must say the old mallee root did a fair job of holding his own discussing the Government’s changes to the proposed ETS legislation. I was interested that Senator Bob ‘We’llallberoonedbeforetheyearisout’ Brownahan was another of his interviewees, and while I have to take a fair few of old Bob’s ideas with a grain of salt, my hat is off to him for handling with grace SilverToes attempt to muffle his ‘party political broadcast’ in SilverToes’ words, and I could not agree with Bob Brown more that ‘Kevin Rudd should serve out his three-year term. This is a time of great challenges facing this nation, not least climate change and the recession, and it's his job as elected leader of this country to stay there for three years and not to be lining himself up for a potential double dissolution.’ The regular readers of this diary from among the billions of my daily visitors know how dimly I view politicians taking the electorate to early elections, the last bitch to do that being Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, with the second last bastard being our former Premier of Western Australia, Alan Carpenter; she won, he lost; they both deserved to lose for the sheer arrogance of it. I do however understand that there are shades of grey in double dissolution triggers that don’t infuse these aforementioned State politics circumstances. So if Kevin Rudd calls a dooblay dissolooshun election, I’ll be unhappy but will weigh the issues with an open mind.

Geoff Sims’ report on the Sydney Prince of Wales Research Institute’s researchers’ findings on white matter in the brain was really interesting, and wasn’t Marion Rice an inspiration for being a virtual centenarian in such good physical and mental health!

Was Ali Moore a little under the weather tonight on her Lateline Business program? Her voice was, I thought, a tad different, and her eyes a tad puffy. Had she hit the Chivas Regal with Kezza, destroying a few grey and white brain cells with him, or just sickening for a cold?

I really enjoyed Dave Letterman’s interview with Kiefer Sutherland, but not so much Jim Norton’s stand up, and Bats for Lashes were really good. Old Dave showcases some really unusual and excellent talent on his program. I’d give my left testicle if I was an act or band to tie his show up.

I had ages ago waved the cantankerous cicada to bed, so she was well and truly in the land of Nod when I came to write, before going on a very late walk. Back to writing and struggling with health issues on my return, then a kitchen clean up, and even after dawn I was back writing. Frank Sinatra duets have been my accompaniment tonight for my writing. A cool night it had been, but not a tremble of a leaf as of late. I managed to get this very entry dual posted before hitting the sack, tired and glad to put the day to bed.

+paytontedwithlove+