Several matters I have been remiss in mentioning, and thanks to everyone who has been keeping me updated on Paris Hilton's decision recently to stop pretending she's dumb. And no, I don't think she did see our show in the comedy festival, although obviously her talent agency has.

Second item on the agenda is not unrelated to the above. In the High Court of Australia at the moment, one of my favourite judges (from a nerdier time, when I followed such things) is hearing a (potentially very important) case about whether or not it is discriminatory that people in jail are not allowed to vote (especially with a view to the percentage of indigenous people incarcerated in our jails). So, with that possibly very inaccurate and wildly generalised description of the case, let's hear what it has to do with Paris Hilton:

KIRBY J: I thought recently there was a case in the Australian Capital Territory where somebody was convicted of a statutory offence of treason, but anyway, it is not very common in this country.

MR MERKEL: That may be right - if that was, I understand it might be the first time if it falls into that definition, but that is our response to that subsection. I was going to say under section 93(8AA) the amending legislation defines "sentence of imprisonment". That is at page 7. This was also a significant amendment because prior to this amendment there was a question about whether home detention or parole would be caught by the disqualification. So this amendment made it clear that you had to be in detention on a full-time basis. So that is in the extrinsic materials. So there was no question if someone on parole or on home detention would not be caught by the disqualification and that comes out as a result of that definition.

Can I take your Honours next to Part VIII of the Act starting at page 122 dealing with - - -

KIRBY J: So Paris Hilton would now be disqualified, but last week for a short time she would have been entitled to vote?

MR MERKEL: Yes, your Honour, and she would have been entitled if she were in Australia and an Australian citizen to be standing here unburdened by the five-year point at least.

KIRBY J: I just wanted you to know that I follow these things.

... Justice Kirby, keeping up with the peeps on the streets...

And the final item on the agenda is that I saw a young man today walking down the street reading a book and carrying a case containing an instrument, possibly a saxaphone, and walking a dog. My previous boastings about being able to simply read while walking down the street have now been cast into a rather humiliating shadow.

Yesterday, I worked until five in the State Library. At five, I got a train to the production meeting we were having at a pub in Richmond. We talked about lighting, staging, sets, sound cues, production management, and the fine art of creating and amending pdf documents. Then I drove straight to rehearsal.

We rehearsed until after nine, at which point I went home and finished some documents, and I got up this morning at six in order to get to work by seven. That's dark o'clock, my friends. That's not my usual caper.

Victoria Law Foundation, where I work, was hosting Major Michael Mori and over a hundred legal VIPs in the State Library for breakfast. This might not mean a lot to some people, but Major Michael Mori is David Hicks' lawyer, and David Hicks was officially charged last night, after five years in Guantanamo Bay prison.

In other words, whatever other long-lasting international repercussions there might be, my central concern this morning was that I had to fight my way to work through a scrum of reporters.

The David Hicks case, when it's explained to you, really looks like a mistake. The most conservative people in Melbourne were gathered in that theatre this morning and it was a pretty stunned silence.

Better go. I have rehearsals til nine. They say sleep deprivation is a form of torture, although I'm sure it's less offensive when it's you who's torturing yourself.

Have a relaxing weekend. Bastards.

There's a vigil today in the city, in Melbourne, to mark the fifth anniversary of Australian man David Hicks being detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

I know, I know. Heavy topic to start with, but sometimes I stop and think about stuff, and today this is what stopped me.

The Americans are taking a "hard line", suggesting that the five years Hicks has already spent in Guantanamo won't be taken into account in any sentencing.

Whether or not David Hicks is a dangerous terrorist, there aren't many people I can think of who have been detained without trial in secret conditions for secret reasons by the most powerful democracy in the world, at any point in history. Rapists, mass murderers, dictators such as Pinochet and Saddam... all subject to a legal system (whether we like it or not).

It strikes me as quite bizarre that a country where citizens demand adherance to a constitutionally entrenched right to carry a gun can't recognise that giving someone a "right" or a "freedom" can result in the system imploding (give someone a right to carry a gun, they shoot someone. Give someone a right to a fair trial, that person is freed in twenty years and offends again). But the alternative is that there is no system at all.

Watching the play of 1984 this year at the Arts Festival in Melbourne, I realised that the reason I found it so depressing was that reality doesn't survive the comparison.

Now, consider this: the two Melbourne newspapers have the same story as their homepage online at the moment. Colour photographs, gushing press: Kylie has been voted the second most famous person in Britain after the Queen. Voted. Most famous. Kylie. Queen.

Do we think The Age and The Herald Sun are being satirical? Are they subverting the dominant paradigm? Is this a really hilarious joke about perspective? Or is reality really that much more insane and surreal than art could ever hope to be? I'm going with the former.

This has been my timetable this week:

Monday: work at Victoria Law Foundation, go out in evening to Arts Law Week event entitled "You Be The Judge," which is all about sentencing laws and which is attended by members of the public with various agendas and which makes me think it should be compulsory for people in law schools to sit through such discussions (ie discussions about what happens to the offenders the lawyers help convict, and what the public thinks of the legal system). Also very interesting to see the people who run the legal system defend it (very impressively in this case).

Tuesday: boring.

Wednesday: Victoria Law Foundation in the afternoon (after a most unproductive morning in which it was proposed by me that I get up early, go to gym and get lots of work done, but which was overruled by me so that I did virtually nothing, got cross with myself and went to work). After work, went to a play reading for Arts Law Week, which happened to star everyone's TV favourite Bud Tingwell, and... my sister. Bud was good I guess, but he was clearly threatened by the stage-stealing performance of my sister, who had only two lines (both of them in the first half) and who was as excited as I was by the fact that the catering at interval was provided by the CWA.

Thursday: Unproductive morning followed by self-induced fury (see Wednesday). Afternoon: go to Victoria Law Foundation, get wig and gown in order to dress as judge and stand in street at seven thirty Friday morning advertising law week because haven't found anyone else to do it, make phone calls, rush out. Go to eye doctor, who renders me temporarily visually impaired so that cannot read either of the two books I am reading (breaching the one book rule), and cannot even guess at the sudoko, which Stewart smugly completes while I sit by and tell him my pupils are being diluted. ("With what?" he asks). Specialist tells me he's never seen healthier eyes in his life, sees me for five minutes, charges me nearly two hundred dollars and tells me to wear sunglasses for six hours. After blindly stumbling home to parents' house to return and borrow things, I go to a Centre of Contemporary Photography exhibition, get in the car, go home. Pass out.

Today: Wake up at OBSCENE O'CLOCK (possibly a quarter to). Get ready to spend morning dressed up like judge in front of streams of people getting off train at Flagstaff Station, most of whom I went to Law School with and are in some cases only a decade or so away from being dressed as judges themselves, step outside to find it is DARK and there is a fog so thick you can barely see you sister who you are going to work with because she often gets up this early and thinks nothing of it and in fact is going to gym before work and pilates in her lunch break. Go and stand outside Flagstaff Station. Call out things about law week, not thinking to be quite as hilarious as the other two people working on Parliament Station, who later reveal that their spruiking campaign is based on the phrase: "Law Week - It's Lawsome!" After spruiking, spend rest of day at Law Foundation, drive stuff around Melbourne returning it, get home, go with Rita to musical at Melbourne University (it's called "Working" - should be interesting) then go to drinks, other drinks, other drinks, possible other drinks, and then home. Collapse, pass out etc.

Tomorrow? Production meeting at 9.30am. Possibility of Rita being late and Lorin being later: somewhere in the high 90% range.

Today I had my eyes tested. I was seeing a fuzzy shape in my left eye.

I was trying to organise a bunch of people to dress up as judges and promote law week in the street at seven thirty tomorrow morning, and I had to rush in to get my eyes tested and then keep trying to work out who was coming when.

Problem is, when you get your eyes tested for blobby shapes, the people in white suits make your eyes numb. They put this anesthetic eye drop thing in your eye and you have to wear dark glasses and you can't drive a car (so just like a rock star - but imagine a Ford Laser instead of a stretched limo). So anyway, I had to get people to read my text messages, write my emails, and pretty much do everything for the next hour or so. It was nice really.

Except the end result is this: I'm going to dress up like a judge and go and stand out in the middle of King Street in Melbourne tomorrow morning at seven thirty.

Hopefully by then I'll be able to see.

I'm frankly still coming down from the screening of the film the other night, which was right up there with the most exciting moments Standing There Productions has had this year (squeezing in just above the time I cleaned my room so comprehensively that I could see my desk for a whole day and a half). But in other news:

Nearly finished Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, which is getting really juicy now that his love of science has driven him to work on a little old thing called the nuclear bomb. But I must confess that I broke the rule of never dallying from one book, and I read two articles about Alan Bennett (in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books) which means that I now feel more or less entitled to discuss him as if we've been acquaintances for years. When David Lodge, in the NYRB article, started criticising Bennett's diary entry of September 11, I found myself thinking, "Oh dear, David, your problem is, you just don't understand Alan". It's just like when I was watching the winter Olympics and I actually called out furiously in my own loungeroom, "Oh I can't believe she thought she could do that during a 360 turn". Massive expert, me.

Today I've been working in the Victoria Law Foundation, trying to help organise Law Week. I was trying to find some funny quotes or jokes about law. Problem was, they had to NOT be offensive to lawyers, which of course left me with things that sound like bumper stickers. "Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal" etc.

So anyway, thankfully along the way I found the following statements from the snorty-laugh-inducing Dave Barry (go here) who is also the man who established the rule that you should never comment on a woman's pregnancy until you actually see a baby coming out of her (in case she has put on weight, rather than become pregnant). Anyway, here's Dave:

"Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world".

Also:

"Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear"

Finally, I greatly enjoy the following as a sage commentary on American party politics:

"The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club".

... If you want to genuinely laugh as well as quite inexplicably wanting all of a sudden to watch the entire of series one of 24, go to his blog entries on TV. Most amusing.

Did I mention we had fun at the screening? Pictures up soon.

A week is a long time in politics, and we all know the personal is political, so a week is a long time in any context really.

In what might be described as irony, one of the stories I've been producing for Radio national this week is about the estblishment of the eight hour day. A hundred and fifty years ago today, after the industrial revolution in Britain (and the Gold Rush in Bendigo), a bunch of construction workers who were building the law quadrangle at Melbourne University downed their tools and marched through the city, picking up fellow workers from other sites and making their point in the centre of the city. The rest of the western world eventually followed by example. Followed. Melbourne. That was how the eight hour day - and Mars commercials - were established: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest and 8 hours of play.

Which of course is why workers' rights are so enormously respected today.

Now, this all feels very close to home for me because:

1. I studied in the Law Quadrangle. In fact, it was the stones in the law quadrangle, laid by the very stonemasons who started all this ratbaggery, that I rested my bike on when I rushed to the Law Faculty to hand in my essays at three minutes to five on the due date.

2. The eight hour day is being celebrated by the deliciously historical people in at the Trades Hall in Melbourne, which is where Yianni's comedy festival gig is (where they call you comrade and give you a free beer when you've just performed a show).

3. Our office in at Radio National is opposite Damien's office. Damien runs the Law Report. I work for the Victoria Law Foundation, which is running Law Week. Also, I'm doing a story on the comedy festival which I've been working at every night, I'm doing a story on the history of protest (in which I feature) and I'm doing a story about writing theatre shows and not being able to get them on in any theatres unless you do the whole thing yourself (which, I dunno, DESCRIBES MY LIFE). So. Maybe if I stayed at Radio National, next week I'd be doing a story on people who come from Eltham and cut their finger almost completely off in grade four and who used to be vegetarian and aren't anymore.

The eight hour day. I wish!