West

There was a nice article in the Australian today about the expansion of the AFL into western Sydney. They quoted Dale Holmes, who runs the NSW branch of the AFL, who said, among other things, "Any new club that comes into western Sydney needs to be domiciled there, truly have a look and feel of western Sydney".

As you can imagine this caused a bit of a ruckus at work today, with lots of speculation about how best to catch the look and feel of western Sydney. I won't go into detail, you can imagine most of it. On a related topic it ocurred to me when I was at the rugby on saturday night that I really should go to a League game.

Something else: in today's SMH there was an article on page 3 where they had the word "towards" as toward's. This really is a sign that we're nearing the End Times.

CDS

There's a spectacularly ill-informed article in the New York Times about credit default swaps.

Bus

I had a dream last night, one of those especially vivid ones you have when you're catching up on sleep deficit. Part of it involved me being on a bus, very late at night, due to some transportation mixup along the way - being late and having flights cancelled and whatnot is a common theme in my dreams.

I was on this bus, and next to me was a young woman who I'd had a perfunctory chat with earlier in the trip (but dreams being what they are, I didn't dream about having the chat, but I knew that we'd had it). I was sitting in the window seat, worrying about being late, not entirely sure where I was. I turned around to see something inside the bus and I realised that she'd moved her head next to mine and was clearly expecting me to kiss her. I was surprised, but quickly recovered my composure and kissed her. I put my arm around her, she put one leg across mine and we just sat there like that as the bus went along the dark streets of wherever the hell it was. We didn't say anything.

There was more, of course. A strange confrontation with my best friend, a lost child, a very small hotel room. But every so often I'd remember what happened on the bus and I'd remember how right it felt, but also, of course, on a more blokey level marvelling that I'd been able to somehow work some magic on a woman in her 20s. Who looked, now I think about it, like a better-fed version of Justine Henin.

Something new

As part of my general policy of trying anything once (well, just about anything) I ended up going to see a game of rugby tonight. I'd been invited as a guest of a company I've been doing some business with.

It was fine, but I can definitely cross that off my list.

Paul

I feel sorry for Paul MacCartney (or Sir Paul, as I guess we're supposed to call him now). He's going through a very messy divorce with a one-legged nymphomaniac and former call-girl who's accused him of beating her up, and everyone still thinks of John as the interesting Beatle.

Edgewater

This is a building in Melbourne, on the beach in St Kilda near Luna Park. I've always found it very evocative - even 25 years ago it still had the same feel to it of faded 60s glamour. Melbourne doesn't really have a beachy thing about it at all, nor for that matter a high-rise feel, so this building and others like it along the beach seem like they've managed to escape from Melbourne in some fantastic way, and I always imagined they'd be full of people who led interesting and possibly debauched lives. Doomed novelists, sensitive women poets, larger-than-life cabaret artistes, that sort of thing. Over the years I've had friends who've lived in pretty much every building in St Kilda but noone had ever lived in there, which added to its mystique. For me, anyway. I did once manage to get in, when I was looking for a flat. (Buy or rent? I can't remember.) It was scuzzy on the inside but not in quite the same agreeable way, and the only people I saw were clueless surfers (why so far from the surf beaches?).

Money

I was at a supermarket yesterday in a nice leafy Melbourne suburb. I only had one or two things so I cleverly avoided the "12 items or less" line, and not just because it's grammatically suspect. You see, it's not really the scanning that takes time, it's the end transaction. Especially if people use loyalty cards and credit cards. Also, in this particular supermarket there's sometimes 2 cashiers in the fast lane, but invariably as soon as you get on the line one of them goes.

So I got behind a woman who had quite a few things in her trolley. As I'd suspected, they were all scanned quite quickly, so I was quite a ways ahead of where I would have been had I got on the fast lane. But then, of course, it all came unstuck.

The cashier finished scanning, and said to the woman, "sixy-five dollars seventy" (or something like that). The woman looked surprised. She then swung her handbag around in front, rummaged though it incredulously and found a purse. She opened the purse and looked inside. There were notes and coins in there, which seemed to throw her.

I wanted to lean forward and say to her "It's money. It does three things. 1) it's a medium of exchange, 2) it's a a unit of account, and 3) it's a store of value". There's an eipsode of the Simpsons where Homer reminds himself "Money can be exchanged for goods and services". And you have to figure that if Homer can intellectualise that, anyone can.

She didn't look as though she had anything wrong with her, but she was spectacularly unprepared for the business end of the shopping trip, the bit where you hand over money. I've been behind people like her - or, possibly, her - at ATMs too, where having gotten to the front of the line they look helplessly at the machine for a while before remembering they need to get their ATM card out and stick it in the slot (meanwhile, I'm hovering behind, incandescent with rage, flicking my ATM card between my fingers).

I need a massage.