I'm grouchy today.

Check out this review by Helen Razer in the online version of The Age, or as we here have come to call it, The Dead Horse.

The show she reviews is called I Know What You Did Last Monday. I haven't seen the show and I don't know any of the people in it, but what Helen Razer hysterically raves about here is that these are first time performers who have misjudged what comedy is and who look nervous and unsure of themselves.

So the only newspaper allowed to report on the comedy festival has kicked the teeth out of some twelve year olds in the playground. Meanwhile, if you'd like to read eight hundred boring quotes about the nature of comedy, go your hardest. Also, lots of four star reviews of a bunch of comedians from America and Australians with their own TV shows.

Where is the analysis of the pumped up misogynists I've seen at this festival doing rape jokes and poof jokes and being laughed at because they're confident and they got four stars in The Dead Horse and the audience doesn't want to feel uncool...?

At the comedy festival, they announced the nominations for a couple of awards the other night.

The two awards they announced were The Barry Award and The Golden Gibbo. The Barry is the official comedy festival award for best show.

This is the funniest thing in the festival. It's positively Kafkaesque. Check it out: the award for best show in the comedy festival is judged by a group of people who do not go to all the shows in the comedy festival.

That's how it works. Say you're doing a show in the festival, and all you want is a positive review. If you get a positive review, you get what's called "a vibe". If you've got "a vibe", then the judges for the Barry Award get along to your show and decide whether or not to nominate you for an award.

Isn't that hilarious? Imagine pretending that's a merit-based decision. "I'm the teacher who will be teaching this class, but only the popular kids will actually be graded".

So anyway, you ready for a shock? Not one woman nominated for The Barry Award. Huge surprise - you could have knocked me over with a cock joke.

The Golden Gibbo is great, recognises really different stuff.

It would be nice, though, if the mainstream award, The Barry, recognised (say) Judith Lucy, whose apparently brilliant and brave show about working in commercial radio, I Failed, is selling out every night. Popular, mainstream, funny... but not shortlisted.

If all this was a play, it would appear dreadfully over-written, really repetitive, and not very funny at all. What a shame.

There is some contention as to quite how this happened, but it appears that at some point during the early hours of this morning, after arriving home from the comedy festival, a chocolate egg appeared in my bed.

Whether this was intended as a delightful surprise or as some sort of prank, or whether it was accidental, has not yet been conclusively determined. Several people are assisting police with their enquiries.

I was awoken this morning by the doorbell ringing and the subsequent silence of no one being home to answer it. I arose with enormous dignity, hair akimbo, and staggered to the door in my pyjamas. My sister, with whom I live, was apparently expecting a visit from her boyfriend and his dad, who live on a farm and had been up since just before I went to bed. With a kind, gentle and caring air about them, as if looking after someone ill, they came in and made me a cup of tea.

As I slowly woke up, I grew more chatty and by the time my sister arrived home I was positively performative.

My sister took one look at me and said, "Why do you have chocolate all down the side of your face?" at which point her boyfriend's dad suddenly expressed his relief, admitting, "I thought it was a birthmark".'

The moral of this story is, if someone says you have chocolate on your face because you have apparently slept in an easter egg, don't protest that it isn't chocolate, because the alternatives would require signicantly more explaining. Also, when you subsequently find yourself being asked why you have a hickie on your neck, and whether you have a weirdly shaped mole half way up your arm, it's probably best to have a shower, do the washing, and ban chocolate from your house altogether.

So I think it's about time I talk about shows in the comedy festival that have nothing to do with me.

Okay, so there's this guy, right. He's called Birdman. He's FASCINATING. I've seen him a few times now and he is just so disarmingly hilarious. The other night, he was asked to go up onstage and do comedy with a band behind him. He used the band to hilarious effect. Made the music look funny and the comedy look like music. Brilliant. I highly recommend him. His show is called Birdmanifesto and you should definitely go and see it. Trades hall, book here. And I've never even spoken to him, so this is unsolicited, I promise.

Okay, next. The guy who has the show after Penny, at the Town Hall, is a guy called Justin Kennedy. If you've ever wondered how to perform a one-person show playing lots of characters, this is how. He is an astonishing performer. His show is based on The Lord of The Flies, which makes it kind of hard to market and (especially if you haven't read The Lord of the Flies for a while) hard to understand in parts, but just watch the performance. It's like getting Cliff Notes on acting.

Also, he doesn't need the publicity, but go and see Daniel Kitson. This year, he's lost something: Fear of the Unfunny. Which of course makes him much more interesting and conversely much more funny. Check him out.

I'd recommend some hilarious women but they're all selling out. Yay.

The online version of The Age (yes, I know, dead horse, we've covered this) was last night running with the whacky headline, "Mother's Fury at Body Bungle" to describe one of the more repulsive stories of the week, namely that an Australian soldier died in Baghdad under mysterious circumstances and the wrong body was brought home to Australia.

Mother's Fury at Body Bungle. Really. Sounds like a story about surgery gone wrong.

Still, at least this morning they've realised it's serious. "How Could This Happen?" demands the front page of The Dead Horse this morning. And just below, there's a VOTE where you can HAVE YOUR SAY.

For real news and interesting articles, check out this.

By the way, I finished two of the essays by my bed by Alistair Cooke. Look out writers' festival, here I come...

Cool thing to watch, when coming to a stop at the lights today: person walking, slowly, wonkily, across pedestrian crossing with private but palpable expression of mirth on face, looking greedily through freshly printed photographs.

When driving past a bus stop, notice that an advertisement for soap is written in confusing font, such that it appears to be advertising "poo" rather than "pure" skin. Notice this only because two teenagers in school uniform, one girl and one boy, are holding each other in helpless laughter in middle of footpath.

Go to bread shop and deliberate for so long about what to get that bread selling woman feels she is complicit in your choice and throws in the other loaf of bread for free on account of not wanting to be held responsible in the event of disappointment.

Also, isn't autumn nice?

In training for the Sydney Writer's Festival, I've decided I need to finish the books I've started (those on the top of the pile next to my bed). Until then, I'm not allowed to buy or borrow new ones because I don't deserve them.

Over the years, I've become a hopeless reader. When I was a kid, I used to read every book from cover to cover, and then read every other book by that author, in order of books written. Now, I'm hopeless.

You know on your computer, if you press ALT and TAB at the same time, it flicks between one program and another? That's how my life works. There I am, working on a film and then ALT + TAB I'm also working at the Comedy Festival but ALT + TAB I'm working at the Law Foundation and ALT + TAB I'm working at Radio National. All the other windows are open and the programs are running and stuff, but I'm flicking between them all the time, so I never quite optimise my experience.

That's how I read, too. I've had Alan Bennett's new book (which is so funny and brilliant) next to my bed since I ordered it online so I'd get it before anyone in Australia could claim to have read it before me. Several ALT + TABs later and I still haven't finished it but I've read several Joanna Murray-Smith plays, two brilliant scripts by Tom Stoppard and the beginning of a book called Boyhood by Coetzee. I also started a book by Will Self but I lost it down the back of the bed somewhere and I wasn't sure I didn't resent and despise it anyway, so at least this way I don't have to find out.

I do feel so guilty about these books I don't finish. It's a form of infidelity, not unlike when you have to turn off a CD in the middle of a really intense bit where the singer is belting out a particularly complicated couple of bars of climax and you have to rush out of the house but you know you're not paying enough respect to Aretha, or Buckley, or more likely if I'm being honest, Ben Folds.

Anyway, point being, book-wise, I am turning over a new leaf. Last night, after visiting Penny's and Yianni's shows (yay for them by the way, they're selling out)... I went home.

Yes! Home. Not to the Festival Club. Not to a Kitson gig or to support one of the local heroes or to a bar to hang out with people I don't see enough of anymore. I went home, I had a bath and I finished Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Yay for Tom Stoppard being clever about British snobbery and writing good characters for women and being a little bit obscure and making you wish you'd studied history right the way through university.

So, I'm on my way. For a lovely take on the reading of books, check out this. Nick Hornby, writer of things like About a Boy, writes a column about what he reads versus what he plans to read every month. Depressingly, he reads more than I do and complains about not reading much and being a philistine. But all that will change now I'm sure and I will become the sort of person Nick Hornby wishes he could be. Or not. We'll see how that one pans out.

Last, ALT + TAB, a dig at The Age, which I realise is a dead horse, but COME ON. Yesterday, they (the Melbourne newspaper that sponsors the comedy festival) ran reviews of Ross Noble (who so desperately needs a good review), two people with national TV shows, and two Americans.

Good. Excellent. So people know what the things they won't be able to get into because they're SOLD OUT are going to be like. What a service to the community.

People have been asking me what I'm planning to do after the Comedy Festival. See what they're doing there? Assuming I've planned to do something after the Comedy Festival.

So, to help me answer that question, Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, has completely surpassed herself.

For my birthday this year, which for those of you playing at home, is on AUGUST ELEVENTH (I'm sure there's a program you can dowload onto your computer that goes out on August tenth and buys me a birthday present)... Mel has organised a Mystery Weekend.

A mystery weekend. Can you imagine how much that's been freaking me out?

Anyway. Turns out... no need.

Guess who's going to the Sydney Writer's Festival just after Law Week?

Mel, I've said it before, you're an alright kind of kid, on balance. And best male in a supporting role here goes to Prash for designing an itinerary the Race Around the World kids would be proud of.

So, now that I've boasted, check out the Sydney Writer's Festival here. If anyone has any recommendations or impressively intelligent/impertinent questions I should ask foreign literary figureheads, do email me and let me know. Anyway, I have to go. I have a lot of reading to do.