Lake Bolac: The Home of Bob the Bunyip

Daphne has been filling in a proper, academic PLEASURE STUDY, she tells me. It is being conducted by a Canadian professor of marketing. I wondered why you would give some marketing guru the information needed to take the pleasure out of one more experience.

Daphne said it wasn't like that: it asks you about two recent pleasurable experiences, how they came about and how they were similar or differed. She told me that she had written about a trip she took earlier this year and about a romantic encounter she had had recently. You could see her get happier as she remembered! I eased the conversation on, not wanting to kill the moment. She smiled more as she told me how the experiences differed, the one being 'restful' and 'pacific', the other 'enervating' but 'attenuating'.

Paris came up, whistling. Daphne's look changed and she went silent.

I still haven't been able to make contact with Scaramouche: perhaps he's helping with the relief efforts in Bam?

Paris got back today - his arrival gave a whole new meaning to 'bright eyed and bushy tailed"! But, more of that when he settles down!

Daphne paddled over earlier at a pace (you can tell ... the list was about 45° ... she has to lean more the faster she goes). She found this new Identikit thing on the Internet and has been playing with it all day. She made a picture of me, and thought I looked very 'fetching'. I checked it ('Load face', 'Bob Bunyip') and thought that it looked a bit like Alfred E. Newman, but that any resemblance to me, fetching or otherwise, was really quite 'far fetched'!

I really don't know why it has to be so hard for me to have an image. Perhaps it's because I can't be photographed?

Yeah, right, Paris! Wish you were here too!

It's a bit hectic around the Lake at the moment. What, with the holidays and all the the contented families cavorting and canoodling all over the place! I decided the best thing for it was to lock myself away and have a quiet day yesterday. I did some work on my current research reports that are due on 12 January, and "pottered" a bit, netsurfing.

I was in a debate once about "the future of the book". We drew the short straw and were resoundingly and mercifully defeated by those who argued that the book has a future in the age of technology. In the course of her conclusion, my opponent quipped that she had often wondered what it would be like to see into the mind of God and have access to all the information there was. She said that she had been on the Web the day before and now knew: it was CHAOS! Still, it's a serendipitous chaos!

Yesterday I found this amazing site where they've emulated types of walking. If you slide the selectors to "male", "light", "relaxed" and neither "happy" nor "sad" and then rotate it while trying to imagine it walking on four legs, it really does look a bit like me. And "male", "neutral", 1/2 "nervous" and "happy" is definitely Farouk when he's got something on his mind.

You can play with the bloody thing for hours! I did!

Paris left this morning, bound for Yarrawonga and the Murray River, for a weekend of what he calls "chemically enabled debauchery and decadence" though I don't think the order matters. Apparently poor old Lake Bolac is too "straight" (as he said pointedly to me). Lake Mulwala and the Yarrawonga Weir "rock", it seems. I must confess I find the idea of skijets and water skiing abhorrent. I thought it was a fair concession when we raised no objection to Bill Brammall and the Hamilton Rowing Club trying to set up a branch over here.

And whatever is wrong with our golf course? Or our wineries? Like Moyston is second rate or something compared with the Rutherglen wines? No! Paris is simply what Christopher Booker called a "neophiliac": nothing tried and true ever seems to engage him for long enough for him to try it, let alone sup its truth! Parigi, o caro ... Sospiro e luce tu mi sarai, Tutto il futuro ne arriderá ... Ah, non piú! Well! At least not for the next few days!

I couldn't let the sun rise further on my anger ... so, I went to speak with Daphne. She usually has a way of making things seem, I dunno, less "stark". I found her on the small bank beside the highway.

'Coin, coin,' she said as I mosied on up.
'Kwan, kwan,' I mimicked, 'What the .... is kwan, kwan?'
'It's the noise a duck makes in French,' says she!

Why? Why would a perfectly normal Australian blue-billed duck (other than for the amputation, that is :) want to speak French.

'It's a ruse for the hunting season,' she told me. 'It is either that or "vak, vak" (which is apparently what her long lost Turkish cousins say) ... they'll need interpreters or they'll never find us!'

And I thought I had matters of moment on my mind. Suddenly, the day seemed better!

Welcome, fellow travellers, to my little bit of the web. Boxing Day has not been good for me! I went to see my old friend, Scaramouche (whom I had not had the opportunity to contact before Christmas) only to find him disconsolate after a self-induced illness and an aborted flute lesson. To try to cheer him up, I began researching the Feast of Stephen, hoping I would find a morcel of wisdom for him in the semiology of the day.

But no! Only details of senseless slaughter. I might as well have waited for the feast of the Holy Innocents! As a matter of fact, I think I will!