Portland

There's a great little piece in Crikey today, where Guy Rundle's in Portland. He describes a coffee shop:

"...the clientele it does have are standard issue Pac-Northwest, like a meeting of plaintiffs for a class action against a particularly inept tattooist.."

You can guess, of course, that I love this.

Tuxedo

There was a piece in one of the weekend papers about a shooting in Melbourne one Monday morning, and they described the gunman's attire as being a nice new adidas tracksuit, the one with the stripe on the top and the three stripes on the pants. Or, as the journalist described memorably described it, a "bogan tuxedo".

As luck would have it, I was at Luna Park yesterday (in Melbourne) and as I was lining up to get a coffee, the guy in line in front of me was wearing the exact outfit! I surreptitiously took a photo.

He also had a soul patch!

Kiwi

I heard a New Zealander, a colleague, use the words "less pessimistic" today. I couldn't even begin to write it down the way he said it; you can imagine it for yourselves.

Harder

I had a session today with Quentin, my personal trainer. His job is to make me into a man-mountain, the sort of man that other men will fear and that women will admire. It's a big job, as you can imagine.

Today he announced, just as we started, "today we're going to go heavier". Well I couldn't just let that go by. "You mean", I said, "that you're going to make me go heavier, while you just watch, right?" He thought that was funny.

Revenge

There was a great article in yesterday's NYTimes about a custom that's dying out in rural Albania, where historically there was a shortage of men (wars, disease, fueds) and so sometimes women would take on male roles. Head of household, defender of the extended family's honor and so on. They were sworn to virginity, and by local custom were treated exactly like men. They had property rights and whatnot that women didn't normally have.

But there was one paragraph that caught my eye, part of an interview with one of these sworn virgins:

'Being the man of the house also made her responsible for avenging her father’s death, she said. When her father’s killer, by then 80, was released from prison five years ago, Ms. Keqi said, her 15-year-old nephew shot him dead. Then the man’s family took revenge and killed her nephew. “I always dreamed of avenging my father’s death,” she said. “Of course, I have regrets; my nephew was killed. But if you kill me, I have to kill you." '

Of course I have regrets; my nephew was killed.... This is exactly why I'm not in a hurry to go to rural Albania.

Rebel

I found this gem in an article in the NYTimes:

"About 10 percent of the adult population in Britain has a non-earlobe body piercing. Prevalence estimates in the United States are harder to come by, but the 2002 report, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, found that 51 percent of the college students surveyed had some sort of piercing, not counting pierced earlobes among the women. "

So there you have it. It's not radical, it's not tough. It most certainly doesn't make you look like a wild-eyed loner at the gates of hell who makes his own rules and whatnot. So take it out.

Semicolons

Nice piece in Slate about semicolons, and it includes this lovely bit..

Semicolons do have some genuine shortcomings; Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once noted to the Financial Times that "[t]he most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism, is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is." All journalists can cop to this: The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support.

I like semicolons and I'm sure I overuse them; this is bad.