I cracked through Spent, partly, of course, because of its abovementioned willowiness and partly because it is a straightforward tale. Cardella herself was raised in a family of straitened means, much like Charlie Sheen in the original Wall Street, and, as she came to womanhood, bought vast quantities of clothes, got herself into vast quantities of debt, and eventually got herself out of trouble through the revolutionary approach of actually paying her bills. While I frankly would have preferred less analysis of Cardella’s psychology and more accounts of calls from collection agencies, the only thing about Spent that really gave me grief was the author’s addiction to fancying up her life story with what sound to me like highly inexact similes. She describes herself as ‘dropping down on one knee like a knight’ to open a shoebox, when I’m willing to bet she was dropping down on one knee in the manner of any normal human being in the nineteen seventies. Similarly, she claims she lifted out a shoe ‘as if it were a small, delicate bird’, when, no doubt, she actually lifted it out as though it were the footwear it was. By the time Cardella tucks a shoplifted shirt to her chest ‘as if it were a precious, delicate kitten’ and arrives at a back porch ‘like a stray dog’, I was starting to worry I had in fact squandered my hard-earned notes on a repackaged All Creatures Great and Small.

I’ve never forgotten the time when I was in Year Nine that my Geography teacher announced out of the clear blue sky that when it came to Bob Hawke, ‘a lot of women find him very attractive’. Naturally, this statement was met with shouts of mirth from a roomful of fourteen year olds, several of whom were saving themselves for a wedding night with gender-bending pop star Marilyn. Hawke (or Bob’s Party, as I like to call it) emphatically did not shy away from the question of Hawkie’s appeal to the ladies, even though it also showed him disgustedly exclaiming that Blanche d’Alpuget’s first biography of him would give readers the impression that he was a ‘raging, lecherous beast’. There was much to enjoy in Hawke – not least a close-up of a ham and cheese sandwich before a conversation with Bill Hayden, and Hawkie not being able to remove a tape from a VCR. However, aside from all the tense conversations with Paul Keating, I have to admit that it was the Blanche business that really grabbed my attention. It was made clear by her wardrobe – variously, leopard prints, peasant blouses and berets – how electrifying and bohemian Blanche was, and these images naturally stay in the mind longer than does the list of Hawkie’s accomplishments that was tacked on at the end of the movie. Then, while watching ‘The Interview’ with Hugh Riminton that screened afterwards, my ears really pricked up when the real-life Blanche (sans beret) was talking about how she had at one time wanted to stab Hawkie with a kitchen knife. (Unfortunately, Riminton neglected to ask whether the humble staffer who had to shelter in the bathroom while Bob and Blanche had a fiery sexual reunion was really listening to ‘Run to Paradise’ on his Walkman.) The bottom line is that the Accord is all very well but it’s difficult for it to compete with talk of ‘Old Silver’ narrowly averting being the victim of a crime of passion.

The only time I can recall this phenomenon occurring previously was in relation to Big Brother. It would be impossible for a human being to have lower standards than I, so it was not due either to snobbery or to finer feelings on my part that I didn’t watch the show. It was more that Big Brother was just too plain a concept for my liking, as it was merely ordinary folk locked up in a house. I did enjoy, however, Celebrity Big Brother, which featured, among others, Anthony Mundine (or, as he calls himself, ‘The Man’) and Adriana Xenides living and loving under the one roof, as well as Warwick Capper being tossed from the house for exposing himself to one of its starry inhabitants. I was also a fiend for the marvellous Chains of Love, which starred individuals who, while they were just as humdrum as those in the non-celebrity Big Brother House, did at least have to conduct their everyday business in the manner of reprobates in a chain gang.

Wading my way through everything on offer on the Juno and Jennifer’s Body rentals, I felt my customary sadness at the way movies that haven’t been as successful as had been hoped are usually so neglected at the DVD stage; it’s like looking at pictures in the newspaper of sad-eyed animals who require rehousing. On the Jennifer’s Body DVD, the only extras are some deleted scenes and a gag reel. The gag reel is a variety of special feature that has a particular poignancy when you know no one involved felt like making gags after the opening weekend, when they looked at ‘the figures’. On the Juno DVD, on the other hand, there is a seemingly endless number of featurettes on the topic of how wonderful the movie, and every single person involved with it is, including one devoted solely to Cody herself, called Diablo Cody is Totally Boss. In them, people laugh at Cody’s every quip as if she’s some kind of overlord and they’re her serfs. This fascinated me, as I don’t think I’ve seen so much focus on a screenwriter since Pia Zadora played one, by the name of Jerilee Randall, in the wholly ‘boss’ The Lonely Lady.

At least I wasn’t alone in my totally wrongheaded views. In the lift that morning, I had heard a white-bearded man state confidently that Gillard would be defeated because ‘Australia’s not ready for a female prime minister’. I thought that this was a ludicrous comment until, after Gillard’s victory, I heard one woman declare that it was a great day for the country and a great day for the Labor Party, and another reply with the words, ‘Are you into Women’s Lib?’, as though we were all in a scene from hairy chested Australian seventies film classic Petersen.

It wasn’t until Story showed a few seconds of footage of Glenn at the helm of Melbourne’s EONfm (now Triple-M) back in the mid-eighties that I remembered he’d actually been my boss for several years. Like, I assume, many who were there, I’d lately been feeling a bit nostalgic for the old EON days, what with the current ads that dust off winged demon ‘Dr Dan’ and feature Slash pounding out the station’s old theme tune with an appropriate mixture of reverence and abandon. (While cute, the campaign does smack of desperation on the current management’s part. Like BP trying to remind you of what life was like before the spill.) Seeing a clip of Glenn striding about the South Melbourne offices at the height of Whispering Jack mania took me back to a time when the winged demon was regarded without irony; thousands of them bursting out of eggs on a conveyor belt in a famous TV ad, which, we were assured, was ‘even more expensive than that AIDS one’.

Like everyone I’ve spoken to, I found it impossible to concentrate on the film’s narrative – the usual ‘ghost train’ approach to a public figure’s life (‘Look, there’s the bit where he wore the America’s Cup jacket’) – as I was spending all my time evaluating whether the actors looked enough like who they were supposed to be. Would it have been better with David Field, who did Hawkie in The Night They Called it a Day? Didn’t the bloke doing Keating used to be the camp hairdresser in the Decoré ad? Is that Bill Kelty or Matt Lucas from Little Britain? Is that Graham Richardson or Griff Rhys-Jones? Is that Gerry Hand or Brick Tamland? Who’s Josh Lawson meant to be? And where’s Gareth Evans? (‘Gareth’s stuck in Jakarta’, a line of dialogue informed us, and you could feel the entire nation’s disappointment.)

So what lesson can be learned from all this? Surely that you should NEVER TAKE A CAB HOME WHEN YOU'RE DRUNK!

Like most movie nerds of my vintage, I first heard about William ‘King of the Gimmicks’ Castle in the essay ‘Whatever Happened to Showmanship?’ in John Waters’ classic 1987 book, Crackpot, and later in Castle’s likeable, if outrageously self-serving, autobiography, Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America, which Waters managed to usher back into print in the early nineties. Although these days Castle is perhaps better known for his cameo appearance in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo (where he supplies the feed line for the notorious blowjob joke) than for his amazing career as ‘the poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock’, most of his movies are available for home viewing (not, of course, in Australia) where you, sadly, can only imagine the crazy gimmicks that entranced young filmgoers in the late fifties and early sixties. I guess you could restage Castle’s madcap ‘processes’ in your loungeroom – wiring up armchairs to electrocute your friends during The Tingler (‘Percepto’), trundling a luminous skeleton over their heads during House on Haunted Hill (‘Emergo’), or insisting they take out a $1000 life insurance policy before viewing Macabre. Certainly no DVD screening of Homicidal is complete without a Castle-style ‘Fright Break’, where your more terrified guests are invited to stand in a makeshift ‘Coward’s Corner’.

‘Hey, aren’t you that guy off Thank God You’re Here?’

‘Starring that bloke from Halo?’ they’ll ask.

The Breadwinner and Dudina went down the coast to visit a friend for two days, but the Dude had a sleepover and couldn’t go, which left him and me to have a bit of bloke time. When two or more males gather, the testosterone will fill the house: flowers wilt, dishes grow mould and the talk turns to movie violence. The Dude had visited Healesville Sanctuary (an Australian animal zoo) with a mate and got so bored during the talk given by the nervous Tasmanian Tiger attendant, they counted the number of times she said ‘Um’ (132).

The front fence of an Australian home is literally the line drawn in the sand that says, ‘This is mine. Don’t come in here unless you’re invited or I’ll sic the dogs on you – or take a shot at you, if this was a farm and I owned a gun.’ We had had a traditional picket fence, with the curly work at the top peaking as a teardrop (although you couldn’t classify orange as a traditional colour), but it had seen better times. The years had caught up with it and some of the pickets had come loose, so the bored and the disenfranchised took out their frustrations with life on the wobbly vertical planks. Slowly, the pickets started disappearing and the front fence started looking like a grinning Chad Morgan after a barroom brawl.

A friend who is the CEO of a community transport company catering for the elderly and disabled asked me to fill in for a few days while one of his drivers went on holidays. I thought about how beneficial it would be for me to help the disadvantaged but thought mostly about the cash, and said I’d give it a go.

When the kids are young, birthday parties are a big celebration packed with as many people as can fit in the back yard. The drinks flow freely and the gifts are plentiful – all for a baby who has no idea it has shat its nappy, let alone turned one year old. In kindergarten and the early school years, the party competition starts in earnest, as parents enlist the aid of balloon-making clowns, magic-dust-spreading fairies and double-decker gym buses. Luckily for us, McDonald’s parties have been few and far between; one I did attend was full of giant Michelin Man-shaped people who looked so depressed that the place had all the atmosphere of a Centrelink office.

It was a free event, and they were short on men. Yeah, all right then, I thought, I’ll help you out.

When the she-bogan was informed of AFFPM, it rushed to the family computing console and onlogged the book of faces. Despite possessing all the political savvy of a waterlogged horsebiscuit, and all the feminist credentials of a suburban football team’s end-of-season trip to Phuket, the she-bogan nonetheless felt compelled to update its status in expression of its newfound interest in events Canberraside, and its salivating glee that a woman had finally ‘made it’ to the top job. Rapidly, the interwebz were awash with innumerable pithy quotes like ‘OMG go Julia lol! Girl power!’ Much like bogans claiming credit for any Australian team’s successes on the world stage, despite having done nothing more than watch it on TV, the she-bogan was anxious to claim credit for Gillard’s rise to power, purely by virtue of possessing a matching set of genitalia. Upon pressing the ‘Share’ button on this missive of solidarity with the sisterhood, the she-bogan returned to the TV to continue watching Two and a Half Men.

Maintain Your Home on a Budget – Use Boy Scouts

‘Why are so many people getting upset with these shows finishing?’ he asked. ‘They’re just TV shows, they’re not real.’

Three minutes earlier, I’d been standing in line with friends having the customary conversation about how ridiculously expensive and enormous popcorn has become. You’ll be familiar with this conversation; it’s the one you have just before purchasing a ridiculously expensive and enormous box of popcorn. As a society, we have proven ourselves incapable of converting fiscal shock into positive action, looking on gormlessly at the escalating price, occasionally voicing concern before stopping mid-sentence to cram more popcorn into our gobs.