There was a bit of a kafuffle on my sidebar this morning regarding  and Jetstar and their wheelchairs stowing procedures. I flick to the Aus and then the Herald Sun. After reading the over dramatized events in the Herald Sun, I then read all 150 posts. I didn’t count but it was roughly 50\50 for and against.

It's Tuesday. And I still may have won. I haven't checked my ticket yet...purposely. It's a sort of bizarro-Buddhist delayed gratification thing (more like delayed depression). You see, until I check it and see the inevitable 'Non-winning ticket' notification flash up on the screen and the sad, sympathetic smile from the counter staff, I … could be a winner!!

Tattslotto: the everyman/everywoman dream. Pay your few bucks and you could win millions. I know it does happen. It happened to a woman where I work. I know her, spoke to her, may have even touched her once (does the good luck rub off?). She won a couple of million on Christmas eve, how cool is that?? She was nice and went off to do virtuous things like make cakes and look after her grandkids, so my envy didn't kick right in … well not straight away anyway.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to produce a column regarding His Jeffness when our esteemed editors informed me of this month’s topic. Having only moved to Victoria around about 18 months ago I had no real opinion of the man or any real knowledge of what he’d done during his reign of whatever (might have been power, might have been terror, might have been rainbows and lollipops for all I know or care).

Sadly, dear readers, the Tribune is not yet making the kind of profit that will pay the rent, the school fees and the upkeep on Justin’s Star Trek memorabilia collection. So I have a job out there in the real world where I have to be nice to paying clients.

One of those clients is an aged care facility, I deal with the business end, where they manage the supply contracts and the property maintenance. They’re professional people; they do their jobs so that they too can pay the rent and the school fees. But I’ve done jobs like that before and there is something that feels a little bit good about earning your living and helping the helpless at the same time. So I like them, and in amongst our contract negotiations and costing calculations we chat a bit about the service they provide.

“... alcohol has existed longer than all human memory. It has outlived generations, nations, epochs and ages. It is a part of us, and that is fortunate indeed. For although alcohol will always be the master of some, for most of us it will continue to be the servant of man" The founding Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism

The word alcohol comes from the Arabic ‘al Kuhul’, but no one knows when it was first used or by whom.

The discovery of late Stone Age beer jugs has established the fact that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period (cir. 10,000 B.C.)

I have a confession to make. I have never been dead drunk. I have been quite definitely happy and expansive on a number of occasions, but I have never really been plastered in a "who-gives-a-fuck what I say or do"; "sing Khe-San at the top of my lungs and vomit all over the counter at McDonalds" kind of way.

Anyone now in their late thirties remembers what drinking in the eighties was like.

Pub rock was more than just alive and well, it was screaming from the rooftops. You could walk into just about any venue and see live music, of one variety or another.

It was the era of pub bands like the Hunters and Collectors and the Black Sorrows, but if you couldn’t get into one of those gigs, there was the Rock Follies, Captain Spalding, The Melody Lords and a hundred other cover bands playing every night of the week.

I don't know what it is with our writers and going off to honeymoon with the communists. What’s wrong with a nice two weeks on Great Keppel Island, drinking Southern Comfort with coke and stuffing yourselves at the seafood buffet? - Eds

Editors of the esteemed Kings Tribune might be surprised and honoured to read that my new husband and I picked up a copy of their superb publication on our wedding day, and that it has travelled with us on an onerous 28 hours' journey through international airspace, so that we now write a missive from our honeymoon destination - beautiful Havana, Cuba.

I have to admit to yet another weird quirk – I know, I know…how many can one person have (ask my husband – he may be able to answer that).

I LOVE The Saturday Age. When I say “love”, I mean it in the slightly unnerving ‘hug it and squeeze it and lick the plastic home delivery wrap and stroke it and gaze at it like a long-lost treasure and maybe speak to it in hushed, conspiratorial tones’ kind of way. I love it like a bought one.

Since I was a very small child, I have always had the pleasure of being surrounded by animals.

I grew up in the heart of Prahran, but between the ages of 3 and 5 we lived in a rural area (which now houses outer burbs McMansions).

I’ve taken some time out from gaming to write 1/4 of a page or so about the dog that owns me.

It was one of those sunny Sunday afternoons, the kind where you could’ve easily have just sat down … and watched the sky change colour.

Picture this. It’s another scorching day in Melbourne and your youngest son bursts through the front door at 3.45, throws his sweaty exhausted little self into the nearest chair, and announces with unaccustomed clarity, “Mother, I’m parched. May I please have a Coke from the refrigerator?”

Too much time at the pub brought my university career to an untimely end the first time around, so in the middle of an existential crisis in my mid 30s I decided to return to study and finish my degree. Then I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life asking if you would like fries with that and that I should therefore not finish an arts degree, but go do a sensible business degree and become an accountant.

At fifteen, one rarely considers school a place of learning.

You rock up in the morning, you get shown what to do, and then you get told to do it again in your own time. It is a social arena of good mates and good times, a colosseum of jests and flirting, and, to many, a court room of superficiality.

“It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is to be educated.” Edith Hamilton

Hamlet and Centrelink

Radio presenter and entertainer Richard Marsland died on 6 December.

....Playing Spot the Paedophile.

Wondering why so many men on the train or at your local are looking kind of odd? What on Earth is going on?

Two Elwood men, Scott 'Scotty' Anderson, 30, and local artist Brad Walker, 32, yesterday narrowly escaped a hefty prison sentence of up to 20 years for allegedly planning to steal the iconic Sydney Opera House and transport it here to Melbourne.

Splash oh how must I swim in this hot and seasoned soup the dumpling was no help it just span around and around

 

Milan Kundera said, in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, that people who walk fast are trying to run away from them selves, but quite frankly I don't care.

As I write this, I am sitting outside a café in Malvern and all the nice Malvern types are walking past glaring at me. Women draw their skirts aside and clutch their children closer as they hurry by.

No, I'm not cleaning my gun or reading aloud from the Anarchist Cookbook. I'm sitting here with a coffee and a cigarette while I kill (yes, the pun was intended) half an hour between appointments.

It’s cold, not as bad as the bitter winter last year, but icy enough to remind me of it.

We’ve taken up a fair few pages in this edition putting shit all over psychologists and the people who go to them. Deservedly so in many cases. However, while we are not very good at taking things seriously, we would just like to say one more thing about psychology.

Last month in the Tribune I published an article defending smoking.

Not attempting to deny the detrimental effects of smoking, but defending it against the moral crusade and hysterical rants of the anti smoking lobby. At the end of the article I promised to spend a month researching the dangers of smoking and come back to you with a rational assessment of the facts.

I hate political correctness. I hate it a lot.

I’m shivering inside my ground floor flat.