I'm skipping town this evening. Cramming a big heap of comfortable tracksuit pants into the back of the car and going away to write.

Obviously I will take a laptop, but I will not take series one through to seven of The West Wing.

I will not take Scrubs. Or Sports Night. Or Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. I will not take Press Gang series one through to four.

I will take possibly a nice fountain pen and a diary and a laptop and tracksuit pants. And possibly some books, but nothing too interesting. Boring books. I will take boring books.

I will be going for strictly regimented walks along the beach, and I will be drinking cups of tea only when I am two paragraphs into whatever it is I am writing (the prospect that I might write two paragraphs is almost unbearably delicious). Anthony Lane can do it, so can I.

Meanwhile, if anyone is remotely as jaded as I am about the state of the media at the moment, keep your eye on this. The idea is, it's people-driven journalism. We tell them what to write about. It's actual democracy!

Girls, here's an interesting reason why we rock: we read more.

Also, another reason why The Age (Melbourne's broadsheet newspaper) is simply hilarious to read in the mornings: in an article about Steve Vizard possibly perjuring himself, the reader is confronted with the alarming prospect that, and I quote,

"The possibility of a perjury charge carries a maximum 15-year jail sentence."

The possibility of a charge now carries a sentence! This is huge news. One can only imagine how onerous a conviction based on the actuality of a charge might be. The legal precedent established here is mind boggling. It could almost be argued that the possibility of a charge in relation to a breach of society's regulations exists in all of us. Certainly this is what the Catholics believe. And Dostoevsky.

I intend to stay indoors and live on canned goods until this matter is cleared up by the authorities. I advise you to do the same.

I'm back in Melbourne today after being more or less stolen and forced to have a week long holiday, very much contrary to my original intentions.

Stew's instructions for packing were: you'll need to wear very warm clothes but take your bathers because it will be hot.

For a control freak like me, that's about as infuriating as packing instructions get.

Anyway, so in the past week I've been to the top of Mount Wellington in Tasmania (wear warm clothes), Manly beach (take your bathers), the Sydney (Art) Biennale (take your black skivvy) and Newcastle (take a camera).

And the answer is yes, I am definitely pretentious enough to tell everyone that I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Melbourne Film Festival, the Sydney Biennale and the Melbourne Writers' Festival, all in a row. I suspect there was a craft festival somewhere in Tasmania or a cheese forum in Newcastle that I can take credit for as well. I really am culturally enriched, if a little pasty around the gills.

The biennale was a bit hit and miss actually. "Zones of Contact" not really the most inspiring theme, however ambitious. Having said that, some of it was excellent. The curator's tour, though, which we had planned our whole day around, was cancelled due to the fact that "he decided it wasn't worth coming". Inspiring words.

By the way, I've cheated on Crime and Punishment. I just couldn't cope with it anymore. Instead, I read the following while on my mystery birthday holiday:

- The History Boys, by Alan Bennett, one of my favourite playwrights.

- An Article in The New Yorker about Wikipedia (it's fascinating and it's here for any fellow nerds who might be interested)

- The start of The Sea, by John Banville.

Excellent holiday. Only one verdict really. Stew's hired.

How's this for robust media - it's the Prime Minister's birthday! Hurrah! The fourth estate celebrates! This article actually describes, without irony, an alleged "journalist" asking a group of rowers on the Yarra this morning to sing happy birthday to the Prime Minister, John Howard, on his fabulously athletic morning walk. Presumably the footage of the rowers singing will have the jouranlist's solicit edited out of it on the television news, although possibly not - why bother? Nobody really thinks the media has a purpose anymore other than providing a huge stack of paper to wrap around the sodoku on the weekends. (Someone I worked with once asked me: "what do journalists do these days? Isn't it all press releases?")

Indeed.

Mind you, some journos are earning their wage. I have found a cleverer headline for the "Man Wins Bet, Loses Penis" article I drew your attention to previously. Click here to read the same article, this time titled: "Bet Leaves Drunk Man Willy Nilly". As I say, I did used to work in commercial radio and headlines like that maketh the radio show.

Tonight, I'm going to the opening night of the Film Festival. Tomorrow, it begins in earnest. Stay tuned for updates, reviews, complaints about the program guide, and reports on the health and wellbeing of a person who sees five films in a row and then attempts to get up and go to work in the morning.

Days like this bring out the old me. The one who worked in commercial radio and desperately searched for stories with headlines such as Man Wins Bet, Loses Penis , because everybody knows the Middle East isn't funny, and the only other thing any of the listeners want to talk about is the fact that cars are piled up on the South Eastern and someone just cut them off in the stopping lane.

It's alarming how, two years later, I read a story like that and feel a flood of relief. There's the backbone, right there, of a two hour show. Thank God.

I reckon I could write down a dozen jokes off the back of that faster than I could name the continents.

And can I remember a single thing about Australian Constitutional Law or, say, the key battles in the Second World War that I spent all that time studying at university?

Nooooo.

I'm sure they weren't nearly as highlarious as the above story though. Nor as worthy of airtime.

Tune into FM radio tomorrow. If they're not taking calls on "The Stupidest Thing You've Done For a Bet" and discussing the potential reasons why someone would chop their dick off in a bar: "Further investigations found the man had just been propositioned by (insert unfortunate celebrity here)", I will be extremely disappointed.

Telstra, the formerly State-run but increasingly privatised satire on bureaucracy in the form of a telecommunications company, received a phone call from me yesterday.

Me: Hello, I'd like to know what to do about a bill I keep getting sent by you.
Telstra: And what is your account number please?
Me: I don't have an account with you.
Telstra: *confused silence*
Me: I used to, but I don't anymore. I still get a monthly bill for the same amount each time. Even though I closed my account with you a year ago, for reasons that might become obvious.
Telstra: Okaaaay.
Me: The bill is for sixty-seven cents.
Telstra: I beg your pardon?
Me: The bill is for sixty-seven cents. But the bill says "do not pay this until your next bill". I have never received a subsequent bill, obviously, since I do not have an account with you . I'd hazard a guess that the costs of printing and postage, and of hiring of the staff to do the mail-out from (I see here on the envelope) Brisbane has probably cost more than sixty-seven cents. But I can't verify that. That's a guess.
Telstra: I'll just go and get rid of that amount.
*Pretty hold music*
Telstra: Hello, yes I've wiped that amount from your account. That was an account transfer fee that was charged to your account after you closed the account.
Me: Of course it was.
Telstra: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Me: No, I would rather if you didn't. Thanks all the same.

I hoped that one was "recorded for quality and training purposes". And I hope the Telstra employees who listen to it have read Kafka.

In other news, this story really does beg to have a short film made about it. Although possibly no one would believe a word of it. How INSANE. I know this is probably insensitive, since no one would want to have a severe stroke and then feel the way this woman says she feels, but I must say that if you wanted to chuck a sicky, claiming to have Foreign Accent Syndrome would be one of the more entertaining ways of getting your sick leave entitlements (presuming you have any after the IR laws). Calling in sick in a Jamaican accent one day, a French accent the next... Want to give it a go? Study up here and here.

Lastly, a con woman, disguised (here) as the sort of person you see on Contiki tours in Europe, has been captured in Sydney this morning. Apparently she had people convinced she was a whole lot of people she wasn't. I have an idea: pop her on an Australian TV show. Wouldn't that be a refreshing change?

In other news, I'm seeing Pirates of the Johnny Depps tonight. For cultural reasons, you understand. Oh yes.

This weekend, after seeing Oliver Twist , I promised myself I would read more "classic" novels, at which point I purchased a distinctly non-classical novel from the new releases section, Blue Water , which I am now half way through. To make up for the obvious disregard I have for my own conviction in these matters, I then purchased the appropriately titled Crime and Punishment , which was six dollars and which had on the back cover "the most readable of the classics". Shut up, I am at least trying.

I saw four movies this weekend, including The Chumscrubber , a movie they're saying is quite like American Beauty mixed with Donnie Darko and as a result it's derivative and boring, but I liked it. It had a sense of humour about itself - a rare thing in films about "young people" being "disenfranchised". I also could ignore its slight misjudgment of things at times because of the acting, which I thought was excellent. That Billy Elliot, I tells ya, he's orright (also, Glenn Close was brilliant, and CJ Cregg from The West Wing should probably be in most films). I took it as a satirical movie - not just a satire on contemporary America (which I agree is getting kind of boring), but a comment on films like the ones it's being compared to. Perhaps I was being too generous, for once, although I doubt that.

******
I visited my Grandmother. She said, out of nowhere, "What are you proudest of?"

My Grandma is a modern-day Shakespeare character. She speaks in simple, considered prose. She looks at you directly. She asks questions that could unravel a kingdom in a day. Then she offers you a cup of tea with a shortbread.

******
I also saw In The Shadow of the Palms this weekend. It's a documentary about Iraq before, during and after the first attacks by the USA. If you would like to know what Iraq is actually like, and how people live there, and precisely how ignorant the media is enabling us (in the west) to be, then check it out. I think I thought of Iraq as just this kind of empty desert with blood and anger and death. The filmmaker, Wayne Coles-Janess, an Australian, has just used footage to make an overall picture, really. No "plot", no cohesive "message", except that Iraq is a country just like where you live, except someone started dropping bombs on it and all the Christians and the Muslims and the pro-Saddam and the anti-Saddam Iraqis were suddenly rushing from crumbling building to crumbling building to haul people out of the rubble. It makes you realise that, as the brilliant chain-smoking school teacher in the film says, "We are under the control of liars". The politicians, all of them, were leading people into a war that the people had no control over but that would change them forever. It's obvious, but it's horrible. Watch the footage of the bombs dropping. Nothing precise or targeted about it.

Actually, I recommend, to really feel the full force of how ridiculous the world is, that you go and see this movie alone, as I did, and then emerge to see a huge TV screen broadcasting photographs of Nicole Kidman's marriage to Keith Urban.

*****
Later on Sunday, I stood in a shop that sells nuts from the counter. They're served hot and in a paper bag. I was waiting for the guy in front of me to order some cashews. His five or six year old son was with him. Their conversation was lovely:

Kid looks slightly perplexed. Peers in at nuts.
- Dad?
- Yep (slightly pre-occupied with nuts)
- Is salt a chemical?
- Ah, no. No, I don't think so. Not a chemical, exactly.
- What happens when it dries up?
- Salt?
- Yeah.
- I guess it gets dry and crystalised. You know, if you took all the water out of the sea, it would just be salt left. Crystalised salt, I guess.
- Yes... What's it for?
- Some people say it makes food taste better. But you can't have too much because it's not good for you.
- (Kid looks at salted cashew nuts for a bit)
- (Dad watches kid watching nuts) Speaks to kid again:
- Do you know what salt tastes like?
- Yes.
- It's kind of bitter, isn't it?
- Yes.

Kid and Dad leave. I tried to get a picture in my head of the kid so that one day I can send him a congratulations letter when he wins the nobel prize in twenty years. Was seriously five. Maybe six, if you squint.

*****

Then last night I saw Richard E Grant's film, Wah-Wah , which was brilliantly performed. As usual, I couldn't cope with the romanticisation or the melodrama that the film sometimes tipped into, but maybe it was necessary in this case.

In keeping with the sublime/ridiculous dichotomy of today, check this out - a most amusing and very brief article about the presents George Bush has been receiving from people since he became president. Yes the presents. The gifts. What would you get President Bush for his birthday? Nothing? (Tony Blair) A gun? (it's on the list) A whip? (same) Booze? (that one makes me laugh).

*******

Lastly, I found out today that the line in the Bright Eyes song I have been listening to in the car in fact refers to the protagonist having a "head full of pesticides" rather than to his having a "head full of pasta sauce". This disappoints me, as I had very much empathised with his position in regard to the pasta sauce. Life is full of disappointments such as these. Go here and check out a website full of them.