stingarees of all degrees, as well as whales and sharks

[freckles_and_doubt]

Today I had meetings at 9am, 10am and 11am, and another that ran from 2-4pm and was characterised by an abundance of meaningless verbiage. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a meeting given to phrases such as "way forward", "stakeholders" and "on the table" never did, never can, never will, actually achieve anything¹. I must make a bingo card, I think. It can only liven things up when someone finally says "grassroots" and I leap to my feet with a cheerful yodel, thereafter, with any luck, being summarily ejected.

khoi_boi tells me that Cape Town's spore count is currently skyrocketing, as all the happy fungi are reacting with enthused growth and propagatory zeal to the recent weather patterns of extreme damp followed by a couple of days of sunlight - rinse, repeat. This is possibly what gave me yesterday's epic beast of a headache, one of those ones which spurned all painkillers with callous disregard, and is still lurking today, cracking its knuckles and occasionally punching my cerebellum. Thank heavens for the lone, abandoned Advil I found in my handbag. Also, headrubs really help. Thanks, khoi_boi.

I seem to have randomly and arbitrarily designated September the Month of Retro Kiddielit Classics, and am inclined, for no adequately defined reason, to run with the theme, so be prepared to deal with the happy dregs of my childhood memories. While we're in Australia: Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff . This is an unalloyed delight, illustrated throughout with Lindsay's exquisite and irreverent line-drawings, and full of marvellously eccentric and wayward Australian characters. The Magic Pudding is called Albert, and is this sour-faced, mean-spirited creature who wears his bowl on his head like a hat and has incredibly long, skinny legs and a tendency to (a) run away a lot, (b) consort with puddin'-thieves, and (c) verbally or physically abuse people. The puddin'-owning characters are Bill Barnacle, the sailor, Sam Sawnoff, a penguin, and the koala Bunyip Bluegum. The characters burst into song at frequent intervals so half of the book is verse, a lot of it slightly scurrilous. Also features a singed possum.

¹ Now it's bugging me that I can't remember who I'm quoting. Wait! it's Dickens. "A nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun." (Frauds on the Fairies. Odd, I had a sort of a vague sense it might have been Churchill.)

Comments

[origamitiger.livejournal.com]

You are going to make me homesick at this rate!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I do seem to have read an unlikely amount of Australian kiddielit, not sure why. Possibly us colonials stick together!

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

"way forward", "moving forward", "going forward", "taking [something] forward", etc. are my new unfavourite business-speak terms. When did this plague first appear? I think I was safely cushioned from it for a long time by working from home. Then I started my new job, and it's like a freaking drinking game. D:

It seems to be a great excuse not to specify *when* and *under what circumstances* you are undertaking to do something in the future.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Yesterday also gave me "commit to dialogue" and "aspirational objective", which likewise seem to quite neatly avoid the necessity for actual action. Oh, and "synergy". Someone actually used "synergy". I thought that only happened in parodies.

[mwotn.livejournal.com]

We used to play Bingo with our bio teacher.... a man with a very deep and strong Welsh accent, and a number of brilliant catchphrases. We also managed to get him to say "I eat babies for breakfast", which rather wrote off the rest of the lesson.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

The local equivalent is to get librsa to say "How much for the little girl?" in his best gravelly bass. It's ... worrying. Alternatively, if you want to lose the next little while to helpless giggling you can persuade my Evil Landlord to say "I love it when a plan comes together" in German. Usually with a piece of droewors (South African dried spiced sausage) between his teeth like a cigar.

[(Anonymous)]

Ooh! My uncle had that book. I don't think he ever actually trusted me with it (silly man), so I never got to read the whole thing, only short bits while he was around. Darn.

scroob

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

But. . . but. . . Playing Buzz Word Bingo is the only way you'll ever justify attending such 'meetings'. Sometimes it's the only thing you'll have to show for them, unless you take along your knitting - now that might be productive use of the time.

H (an electronic design engineer) regularly gets to attend Progress Meetings. I keep telling him to say that they'd be making a whole lot more progress if they didn't have to keep attending the stupid meetings. He says that, just very occasionally, they're actually useful. I'm considering teaching him to knit sometime soon too!