Well the Film Festival opened on Wednesday night with the hilarious "black tie" requirements (as always) being almost completely ignored by the Melbourne crowd, especially the people I was there with (who had nailed the "black" part of the dress code but needed some help with the more formal aspect symbolised by the tie).

I very much enjoy an industry event where somehow, despite all the best attempts of the organisers, a bunch of interesting people have managed to lie their way in. In other words, my friends were there, which is brilliant and which means I still haven't quite recovered.

Last night I saw The Hawk is Dying , which stars Paul Giamatti from Sideways , Michelle Williams (Jen from Dawsons Creek ), one or other of the Culkin brothers, and an extremely manhandled hawk. I then saw a Hungarian film called Taxidermia , which was genuinely insane and involved a bloke who stuffs animals, a couple who eat competitively for their country (a brilliant satire on sport actually), a guy who has sex on a dead pig, and rather a lot of projectile vomiting (welcome to the topsy turvy world of MIFF). Then we saw Thank You For Smoking , alongside a short film by the guys who made it, who did a Q&A session afterwards.

My recommendation so far is Thank You For Smoking , with the caveat that it's being released soon anyway so don't waste your MIFF time unless you have too much of it (erhem). But it's very funny and it's well-written, which are two elements I rather enjoy in a film that's supposed to be funny and well-written. The short film they made, In God We Trust , was great fun too - yay for finding people early in their careers!

I've just realised the young soapie drama theme here. So far, Seth from The OC (Thank You For Smoking ) , and Joey and Jen from Dawsons Creek (Katie Holmes, Thank You For Smoking and Michelle Williams, The Hawk Is Dying ) have all been in MIFF films. Perhaps Standing There Productions' next film should have a Neighbours star in it, preferably engaging in recreational drug use or down and dirty sex, or playing someone with "difficulties", to up the street cred. Mental note.

Tonight, Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, is in town to enjoy The Way I Spent The End of The World and the Sarah Silverman docco with me this evening, before an action-packed weekend of too many films and not enough time to do my homework.

Yeep. See you Monday.

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.

So how's this:

1. Three grant applications for three separate projects due in the next three weeks
2. One grant application due for Victoria Law Foundation in one week
3. Three weeks worth of film festival films to be watched, starting tomorrow
4. Under half the films actually booked on account of booking system being worst in universe
5. House out the back being sold, so people "inspecting" via side entrance, next to our house
6. Some "interested home buyers" have since broken our fence, stolen housemate's new bike
7. Housemate has flu
8. Housemate possibly not able to claim on expensive insurance policy
9. Freezing cold day
10. Heater suddenly and inexplicably broken
11. Attempts at turning on heater makes whole house smell like fire
12. Landlord coming over
13. Landlord possibly not as keen on weeds in front garden as we are
14. Kim Beazley is the leader of a political party
15. My grandma is in hospital
16. Plays, film scripts, and grant applications do not, apparently, write themselves.

Spewbags, as they say in the classics.

So it's that time of year again. I cannot imagine how I'm going to find time to celebrate my birthday (AUGUST ELEVENTH) what with one thing and seventeen billion others being crammed in between here and December.

First of all, the Melbourne International Film Festival opens on Wednesday and I'm going to the opening night film, and then, every day after that, to between two to five films, in a row, at a time, between Thursday and two days after my birthday (WHICH IS AUGUST ELEVENTH).

Just for practice, I went to the movies on Saturday night, where I found myself at the end of the longest queue I have ever seen at the Nova in Carlton, which I am happy to say was the queue for an Australian film. The film was Jindabyne , which I really enjoyed (I love the Paul Kelly song and I seem to remember studying the short story and not wanting to tear it to shreds, which is high praise of course, and there were some great performances in the film). There's an Aboriginal woman who, just near the end of the film, is quite, quite brilliant. Her use of pockets is lovely.

Er, also, without being at all unprofessional about it, my friend Simon is in this film and he's ace. And if I didn't already think he was ace, I would probably still think he was ace (he does this thing in this scene at the pub which I am going to have to buy the DVD for, just in order to press pause on the exact, teensy, tiny, little moment where he gets it right). Fascinatingly, his birthday is just after my birthday, or just before, I can't remember which, but in any case it somewhere around the vicinity of my birthday (AUGUST ELEVENTH), which of course is also an important reason to go and see Jindabyne.

Anyway, Crime and Punishment is still tormenting me but I am no further into it despite reading it for what feels like nine months. Hopefully I will be finished by my birthday which is on AUGUST ELEVENTH in case there was some lack of clarity surrounding that issue.

So Bleak House (Sunday nights, ABC, after the nature show omigod how cool are Sundays) has been the light house in the dark fog that is Crime and Punishment - goodness the Dickensian intrigue is almost too much to stand! The possibility that everyone is related to everybody else and that fortunes could change in the slip of a gene pool is just tantalising. Makes me think I should have read the book. Oh well. Who has time for that?

... Which is the logic behind the fact that I have also started listening to Mao's Last Dancer as an audio book while I attempt to tidy my bedroom/wake up in the mornings/establish some kind of existence for myself in the pre-coffee hours of the day. So far it's really great, although it's confusing when you watch Bleak House , read Crime and Punishment and listen to Mao's Last Dancer all in the same half a day on the weekend. By the end of it you feel like a Chinese woman with bound feet and a fortune that may or may not be yours who has just murdered someone. Yeesh.

So, August eleven, did we get that down? Birthday songs, poems, odes, and arias will be gratefully received between now and August 12th (although those on August 12th will be accepted with some degree of haughty disdain). iPods will also be accepted, as will apple crumble, frisbees, warm knitted gloves, or brightly coloured wigs.

Also, she doesn't read blogs, but get well Grandma.

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.

I wonder if the people next door have some kind of surveillance system set up outside my house. It wouldn't be difficult, because the (empty) house next door towers over my living room (which is also my office) and there must be someone there with a camera, or at the very least a pair of binoculars, waiting for me to stop doing the "other" jobs on my list, pour myself a cup of tea, and settle down to write.

That must be what happens. Otherwise, how would they know the exact moment to turn on their noise making machine to the EXTREMELY LOUD setting and then shout over the top of it to each other in angry voices for hours on end about exactly what to do next?

Coldest morning since 2002 or something this morning. They reported in the paper that it was particularly chilly in a place called Coldstream. Well, honestly.

Up to part five of Crime and Punishment . Thought last night that in books such as this one there should be encouragements along the way ("nearly there!" and "the ending is worth it!" etc). Perhaps a graded system ("you are now 80% more likely to say something clever at a dinner party", or "congratulations, you are now 20 pages further into this book than most people").

I am going to be so smug when I finish this book.

On the days I work from home, I quite often only ever speak to one person for the entire day. Sometimes that person can be the woman calling from India to tell me about the exciting deal I've secured by being randomly selected, sometimes the person can be the girl at the gym who swipes my card and says "locker?". But most days, it's the guy in the cafe on the corner of the street who is also struggling through Crime and Punishment , and who shares my impatience about, well, the length of the damn thing and the fairly consistent conditions of the novel (ie nothing happens - protagonist worries a lot, goes on walks, is antisocial, falls asleep for hours, is Russian and poor, and altogether rather cranky).

Don't get me wrong, I know how important the whole existentialism-before-his-time stuff is, and the fact that Dostoevsky was writing during what my old literature teacher used to call "a period of great social upheaval" *, but Camus managed to write about the existential crisis of a man stuck with the consequences of a crime and he kept it punchy, Fydor.

As any Trivial Pursuit player knows, a quick game's a good game.

Having said that, I love reading a Dickens novel, no matter how long. I wonder if it's different reading Crime and Punishment in Russian. It would probably take me less time to learn Russian than it would to finish the book so perhaps I've gone about this the hard way.

But to take the blame back from one of the most celebrated novelists in the history of the world, and to reclaim the blame a little bit for myself, Coffee Guy and I agreed today that it's probably partly the fact that we're from the instant-information-generation (I could look up Crime and Punishment on Spark Notes or just google it without having to read it). But this is part of my new regime. No starting another book until I've finished this. No skipping pages. No infidelity of any kind to any book. Treat it with respect, and then when you've finished it (much like when you've ended a relationship) you can politely, with measured consideration, trash it over dinner with your close friends.

Still, those other, younger, better-looking books are really tempting me.

* By the way, my (rather amusing) literature teacher also insisted that any era, at whatever point in history, could be described as "a period of great social upheaval". He promised (he was teaching first year literature) that every lecturer we ever had in any humanities subject would begin the opening lecture of the year with the words "You must understand, we're talking about a period of great social upheaval here". For anyone still studying, pop it in an exam. Never lost a customer.