NEW YORK: "I ain't misbehavin', but you can squeeze me," said one of God's chillun, a bubbling bundle of joy, adding "All that meat, and no potatoes!"

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

'In other news…'

21^st May 2010

Friday: A rather warm day for late late autumn, which surely means a harbinger of rain?

I was very tired, (We enjoyed an evening meal with The Babies Ink&Peggletter here last night, after I first met them at Jaques Tarjay in Stirling, where they kindly bought us a new set top box for digital TV, to replace the Christmas present they bought us but five months ago, which had begun going on the blink. They were able to get a credit on the old machine still under warranty (how low the quality has become in general with electronics!), but put more money, bless their generous socks, towards a replacement. We had the evening with just the four of us, on account of the lergy I still am shaking off and Missus Inkletter seems to be coming down with, and which The Dear Leader wants, sensibly, to avoid if possible), as I was saying, I was very tard, but dragged myself up to get ready to take Bob swimming. The wily wayfarer had shot off ALONE to Spotlight at Joondalup while I was preparing myself and cleaning up the kitchen. The sneaky sneak thief was back about fifteen minutes before I left for Bob's – relatively early for me.

There had been a shower at Bob's vicinity and Midland, judging by the reasonable – some might say prima facie – evidence in the form of puddles everywhere. He had a reasonable stint in the pool at Swan Aquatic, and I had a very enjoyable catch up meanwhile with Allan Schintu, who I hadn't noticed here for many months, maybe since last year. He inspired me with the way he is striving to meet a very difficult bereavement that has struck his family.

Bob and I finished with a cup of tea and walk by moonlight (sounds romantic, unfortunately!) along the river bank at Fish Market Reserve, and I finally got home about half seven.

My usual evening struggle with keeping my eyes open began, and more's the frustration due to the Aunty lineup and SBS documentary schedule for Friday nights. Lateline: The (Leigh) Sales Graph: Attired simply in a sapphire blue collared button up blouse, with but tiny earrings her only resort to jewellery, her hair loose hanging and convex curved, subtle effect make-up with dark eyeliner, Ms Sales looked magnificent, she looked Rembrandt without apparently trying, and whatever she did with her eyes tonight it worked a treat, informing me that I know less than I am tempted to think I do about what works with women's presentation.

Wild and ominous events of the last day on the stock exchanges around the world brought out the economics analysis maestro, Stephen Long early in the program: The (Stephen) Long and Short of It: The birthday boy (tomorrow) was most conservatively outfitted, in a dark suit, patterned with faint lined large rectangles, a dark tie close to the jacket shade, and a lavender shirt, and while his hair was under control in a manner of speaking, it will be in for one hell of a ride tomorrow when his Mum tousles it all day long.

A grim faced Mr Long got straight to the bad news after a serious faced Ms Sales asked him to update us on what was happening right then on the European markets, and the picture was not pretty.

In his wonderfully clear and frank style, Mr Long dissected the mess and made quite a bit of sense of it for us, and he had a mere 2¾ minutes tonight in total. The only smile we got from him was when Ms Sales wished him a happy birthday for tomorrow, but it was so sweet it made up completely for the grim faced beginning.

I was disappointed to hear Ms Sales then use the word 'slammed' as she introduced her next story: "The Prime Minister has slammed the shadow treasurer for suggesting that the falling value of the Australian dollar is linked to the proposed new tax on mining profits." It is one of those ugly lazy words that has become so beloved of newspapers in recent decades for use in their headlines, trying to let us know that so and so has just criticised another so and so or such and such; yes it has the slight advantage of being a short word, but it is a dumb word, and has no place in spoken journalism, when there are but nano seconds' difference between the utterances of 'slammed' on the one hand, and 'criticised', 'censured', 'rebuked', 'attacked', etc., on the other.

Ms Sales' long interview was with Small Business Minister Craig Emerson and shadow Immigration Spokesman Scott Morrison, and these men looked immaculate, Mr Morrison in-studio in Ultimo, in his near taupe suit and white shirt combo, and his striped camouflage green tie, Mr Emerson on-screen from Canberra, in his dark striped Payne's grey suit and white shirt combo, set alight dangerously with his fine white dot textured lust red tie.

Let me commend them both for how maturely and considerately they responded to Ms Sales' first subject, that being the fall from grace of NSW Government Minister David Campbell this week, and the issue of the publicising of the private lives of public figures; this matter took up almost a massive 10 minutes, but it was most enlightening and worth the time, given the exemplary way the pollies dealt with Ms Sales' examination.

Oh, and on a light hearted note, full marks to Mr Emerson for employing the word 'Calathumpian' in that segment.

The remainder of the interview became very typical of sparring political opponents, except that the lads remained relatively well mannered, and despite some protracted over-talking of each other and the anchor a couple of times. Ms Sales managed to go with the flow beautifully, and the interview rolled on in a natural and at times robust manner. Well done the three of you, and your conclusion was a lesson in good natured politeness.

Regular readers of this blog, of which there are billions, have not heard me complain for a while about Blogger, the abomination that I have to use to publish my posts. Well, that's simply because of complaint fatigue, not because the stupid thing is much better. This week, without warning, the preview button in the editor in Blogger in Draft, my preferred editor this year, has moved from the stub at the top of the page, to the bottom, and its behaviour has radically altered, now requiring a whole webpage load, rather than the text-only load of previously, which gave a reasonable indication of what the finished post would look like.

Now I'm waiting for the whole page to load, messing up my visitor statistics and upping mightily my monthly download use, just to get a look at the preview. My postings might be a tiny fraction of the whole web page, but now the whole frigging page has to be loaded just to get a look at how my post's editing is faring. Get stuffed Blogger, like I've wished for you a million times before. And this preview change is not the only thing going haywire this week: line breaks from Word are being ignored, which greatly increases the time I have to spend manually putting each one in between paragraphs, again, after doing it all in Word first. Oh, did I say 'get stuffed Blogger'? I think it might be a fantastic tool in another ten years.

[Back from the future update: My next posting session, over a week later, has seen the 'Preview' facility return to its former position and function: Fanbloodytastic! and may the boffin/s responsible for the time out without this useful facility suffer for at least a week with chilli powder impregnated underwear in the crotch and botty hole area.]

For almost three years Blogger has been one of the banes of my life, a necessary evil I've had to endure to run my blogspot web pages, consuming, especially in the first year, inordinate amounts of precious time due to its flaky and arbitrary habits.

This week I began reading Anne Enright's 'The Gathering', kindly loaned to me by Baby Inkletter, and I am engrossed by her masterful storytelling, and her wonderful wielding of her sentences. I hope to do a review when I'm through, and it will contain a potential criticism, however.

+paytontedwithlove+