The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Fifth Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Very High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
Level 7 (Violent)	High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	High

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

look, the highlight of my week has been the sight of a six-foot plastic beetle in a company foyer, with an exerminators' van parked outside. so what's to blog?

maybe the four days down the coast, eating and sleeping and (just once) swimming in the freezing Southern Ocean with wetsuited surfers has just overrelaxed me. pointed the film camera at various things, and I'm thinking of doing a Lomo-style survey of my everyday stuff. anyone in Melbourne will share my shock at what happened to Brunetti's and I'm kind of sorry I didn't get a photo of its 1960s cake shop decor before they raced it up.

dragged boy to see Punch Drunk Love over Easter, and thought it just a perfect little movie. apparently some people don't like movies that don't tell you where they're going. I love them.

um, what else blogworthy? still no house to live in, still bashing a semblance of courtesy and communication out of the architect. artists should not be allowed to be project managers. working on selling my flat - also trying to bash some honesty out of the real estate agents, who wanted to underquote outrageously. I'm instructing them to raise it a bit - a) I don't want to play quite that dirty and b) it's just a flat, people won't fall in love with it and overspend like they do houses, so that bait and switch won't work and c) I want to position it in the market where it should be - why would I be wanting to attract people who can't afford what I want them to pay?

while we were travelling around in the MX-5 (finally fanged it along the Great Ocean Road!) with the fluffy dog, I noted a couple of the comments he got. #1: April 24, Lavers' Hill, 3:30 pm: "Look at that beautiful dog out there!".
# 2: April 26, Apollo Bay craft market, about 11.30 am, from a teenage boy, delivered real quick: "Coolestdogintheworld."

these are typical pieces of spontaneous praise. I wish I was his mother so I could feel terribly proud.

there have been a lot of newspaper articles lately discussing trends - fatherhood and so on - in terms of the way those things are portrayed on TV and in movies. and the movies/TV are inevitably based on/inspired by something else. and so on.
is there just one person in a small room somewhere, pumping out actual original ideas? and are the rest of us just feeding off that?

today I took a backward step, technologically speaking, and bought a film camera.
my last one was stolen two years ago in Ireland. ever since, we've been using the digital camera and unidentified digital files, which I may not delete even if the images are cr*ppy, according to one's husband, have been banking up on the laptop.
so I can't sit down and flick through them. sure, I can print them out. or I can shrink them and post them here.
but with a road trip coming up next week (about time that MX-5 got down the Great Ocean Road, after a year!), I felt an urge to point and click.
I didn't get a really good one, but good enough. it's got a zoomy thing and red-eye reduction and a snazzy silver body. it'll do.

you can be turned into a diamond after you die. possibly the weirdest burial plan I've ever heard.

via the star-studded cast at the new expat blog, Lost in Transit.

is it just me, or is all this Saddam stuff getting more South Park by the minute?

first the playing cards

now this: A retired banker living in Switzerland spent 10 years helping Iraqi President Saddam Hussein hide millions of dollars via a bank account under the name of Satan, Britain's Sunday Times reported.

pictures of Melbourne

blogging? what's that? no time.

all is v. normal, at any rate. annoying site meetings, never enough time to see people, life dominated by renovation and the need to walk fluffy dog 3 times a day.

my big adventure was a dip in the 17 degree waters of Port Phillip Bay, via the Brighton Baths.

I really, really needed a swim; yet another headache, etc. and my regular pool has closed. so I struggled down to the sea baths and paid me money.

very cold water has this interesting effect on me: my chest constricts and I can't breathe. at first I clung to the steps, then after dunking my head underwater, I struck out for the other side, maybe 30 metres away. I swear I thought I wouldn't make it back, even though I turned after about 7 metres. once I realised I could touch the bottom, weedy and rocky though it was, I got braver. made it all the way to the other side and back, panting and hooting and wondering if the warm sensation in my limbs was hypothermia. I mean, there was one guy swimming around in there in a wetsuit, and I was virtually naked. I lasted about 10 minutes, I guess.

the thing is: it totally got rid of my headache. so I'll probably do it again.

well, that was a day.
W's wife, J, was amazingly strong. she stood up in front of a couple of hundred people and told their four kids (one hers, but he was the "dad") all the things W wanted to say to them when he was alive, but couldn't; why he loved them, what he got from them and that he was sorry he wasn't there. She also made sure to tell them not to carry his pain with them. she spoke for ten minutes at least, beautifully, and I am full of admiration for her.
as it was a pagan funeral, there was a meditation/visualisation; a chance to see him leave (stepping up into a sunbeam, and it worked better than it sounds), and to speak to him one last time. everyone very very upset of course, and when they took the coffin out she let herself cry properly, which was heartbreaking.
there were a couple of people there I haven't seen for close to ten years - W and J and I went way back, 20 years, but haven't been close lately, though knowing what's going on with each other.
the house they'd just finished building on their bush block is beautiful, their kids are beautiful and I still can't work it out. there was talk about him resolving issues in his life and so on, but if he'd finally done that, why suicide?
I'm trying not to be angry with him. as I hardly saw them, it's not like I'll miss him specifically, but I am so sorry that he's gone.

so if our world is constituted by what we share with other people. and it's this belief in the existence of other people that gives meaning and substance to what we experience (to mangle Heidegger etc).
what does it mean when a person with whom we share our world, or did very closely once, decides not to live any more? is our total world diminished by this, either in reality or perception?

the person in question is, was, married to a woman who was my best buddy when I was 17 and stupid. at the time (17), he was the partner of another friend of mine. I am remembering snippets of the funny half-lisp with which he talked, coming down to Melbourne one day on the back of his motorcycle, sitting in a corner on my 17th birthday packing away vodka and having what we used to call a D & M. his slightly defensive manner, mixed with sensitivity. the mudbrick house he and his wife were building in the bush to house them, her daughter, his son and their ?2?3? - see, the ties aren't as close as they were - kids, one of whom is still only 12 or 13. they came to my wedding. he died yesterday. the message I got said he'd been having difficulty lately. whatever that means.

earlier today, before I heard, I saw a shrivelled little lady with white hair tucked away in a corner of McDonald's, using a magnifying glass to check the death notices. by the time my grandmother died, very few of her contemporaries were alive. who has to be last?

I'll probably be going to a funeral this week.

most of the links to the time traveller yarn appear to be around March 31. hmm. is it a real story or an April 1 setup?

and a very sensible dolphin. bugger these sea-mines, I'm off to have fun! Douglas Adams was right.

NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!

puggle (baby platypus) update: there were TWO of them. the second one was hiding.

I came into work today to an email from a journo at another publication praising my front page yarn on wireless Internet.

in honor of the self-satisfied feeling that created in me - even though I had to come in early last week and bust my gut to get it done, still knowing it wasn't entirely what I wanted to do - I dug up this, from a book I found in the Ballarat Mechanics' Institute Library when I was 18 or 19. The book is titled Adventures in Journalism

"The adventure of journalism which has been mine - as editor, reporter and war correspondent - is never a life of easy toil and seldom one of rich rewards. I would not recommend it to youth as a primrose path, nor to any one who wishes to play for safety in possession of an assured income, regular hours, and a happy home life.
It is of uncertain tenure, because no man may hold on to his job if he weakens under the nervous strain, or quarrels on a point of honour with the proprietor who pays him or with the editor who sets his task. Even the most successful journalist - if he is on the writing side of a newspaper - can rarely bank on past achievements, however long and brilliant, but must for ever jerk his brain and keep his curiosity untired.
As nobody, according to the proverb, has ever seen a dead donkey, so nobody has ever seen a retired reporter living on the proceeds of his past toil, like business men in other adventures of life. He must go on writing and recording, getting news until the pen drops from his hand, or the little bell tinkles for the last time on his typewriter, and his head falls over an unfinished sentence. ... Well, I hope that will happen to me, but some people look forward to an easier old age.
I have known the humiliation of journalism, its insecurity, its never-ending tax upon the mind and heart, its squalor, its fever, its soul-destroying machinery for..."

and that's just the first page!

it's official.
wanting to go to IKEA is not as daggy as we think.
not if LoobyLu is going.
everyone I know is feeling the inevitable pull of the homewares maze. soon, soon.

oh, and I've dropped out of uni. will think about that later. but it had to happen. that sort of thing shouldn't be a drudge, and that's how it was shaping up.

goshdarn doesn't it show when one slacks off posting and there's not much happening around here?

look, to me it's all truly fascinating. shopping for lights, booking tradespeople for the house and my pub, keeping up with the war, etc, etc. trying to keep up with exercise (a bit), friends (not very successfully) family (must ring my Mum). oh, and there's work

but I just don't feel compelled to blog it all right now.

blogon

War boy
Think your job is challenging? Maybe even dangerous? Log on to Kevin Sites' blog to realise just how mundane and sheltered your life really is.
Sites is a CNN correspondent in Iraq. Not near Iraq - actually in Iraq, in the city of Kalar, as of late last week.
While working his way through the north of the country with fellow correspondents, he finds time to email and phone in the occasional blog entry detailing his adventures. He even sends in photographs of the locals - some were still managing to smile for the camera last week - and if you have the right software you can listen to his phoned-in posts.
Luckily for Sites, he happens to have an Irish passport as well as a United States one. He also manages to stay calm in the face of threatening local chefs, rooster sacrifices to "christen" his car (probably not the word the locals use for the ritual) and aggressive attempts at story-spinning by army press officers.
His previous journeys through wartime Afghanistan are included, bearing the somewhat gung-ho title of "War Boy Journals Part III".
A typical quote: "The shock waves of the explosions are dulled as they cross the valley toward us. But they are still persuasive. Their concussions a silencing voice, ripe with anger, full of vengeance. We watch from a forward front line position. There are dozens of other journalists here. It is a theatre of war and war as theatre."
Anticipating the war, he wrote: "What will happen, where should we go? Race west toward the oil fields of Kirkuk," Sites writes.
And if all of CNN's coverage goes blank one day, Sites will know why. He says the buzz among the media on the ground is that the US intends to use an electromagnetic pulse weapon to disable all electronic gear in the war zone, including satellite transmitters and mobile phones.
"We could end up covering this war with wind-up film cameras." Sites writes.
Although the blog is still there, CNN has told Sites to suspend his blog. The reasons are unclear but Sites has complied.
www.kevinsites.net

this may be a dumb question (one is very, very tired today), but what happens if a missile hits a chemical weapons factory?

hmmm?

cnn seems to have told Kevin Sites, CNN correspondent and real warblogger, to shut up.
notwithstanding his Ernest Hemingway complex, this is a bad thing.