In Penny's show, Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, Kathy Smith talks about finding Horsham on Google Earth (she's a teensy bit of a nerd).

Anyway, so now everyone in my house is sitting around looking up stuff on Google Earth. We've found my old house in Boston, and the place down the road from there where I used to get cheesecake icecream (seriously), and the place where I used to chuck a frisbee with a guy called Jim who I once told a joke to about a war veteran and then turned out his dad was a war veteran and the joke wasn't very funny and that was a bummer because it's the only joke I've ever remembered. We've found Boston College (and the Boston College football field which is the size of some island nations in the Pacific) and the resevoir I used to walk around to get to college every morning. We've found my house in Melbourne. We've found the university and I remembered how I used to play hockey and wondered what's happened to that part of my brain (what does it do now?).

Anyway, now it's getting silly. We tried to Google Earth Paris Hilton's house.

So I've decided I'm going to read some more of my book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, because in his spare time while he was studying at college, he worked out that if a trail of ants came into the cupboard of his room while he was studying, he could circumvent their trail to the cupboard and redirect it back outside, via a pile of sugar, merely by making individual chair lift things for each ant and redirecting them all for an hour, until all the other ants followed. It's got to do with the little trails of acid they leave around the place.

That is what he did in his spare time.

Actually, now that I think about it, he's exactly the kind of person who would spend hours on Google Earth. Possibly not looking up Paris Hilton's house.

In our defence, we were only looking it up because we thought she probably had a pool we could see from the air.

Because that's a good excuse.

On the weekend, I was an extra in Robin's film, which was filming at Bar Open in Fitzroy. It was a lovely set, and making stuff is so much fun - all these people doing all these little things which end up making a movie. Pretty cool. On the way there, I was walking down Brunswick Street when I saw someone ahead of me, walking along, bent over a walking frame on wheels.

I thought, wow, he's kind of young to be on a walking frame.

Then I realised he was carrying beers. Down Brunswick Street. Carefully. On a Saturday. Lots of beers.

I told my grandma, who has a fame of her own, and she smiled. "Good on him", she said, "they're very handy, these things".

Now I wonder what my grandma gets up to when I'm not visiting her on the weekends.

In other news, I looked through the photos from the screening the other night, and they certainly are interesting. Lots of empty wine glasses, and a rather interesting shot of me and Rita which, given it happened on tour, shall stay on tour forever more.

They'll be up soon. We're getting there.

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.

Dear the tallest guy in the world,

Congratulations on getting into the Guiness Book of World Records and everything. I guess that must be pretty exciting in terms of things to tell people at dinner parties.

Does it necessarily mean, however, that when you go to a Whitlams gig you absolutely have to stand directly in front of me?

When you push past everyone, just as the gig is really warming up, and tread on their feet so you can see Tim Friedman better, must you do it while wearing a hat?

Do you have to jerk your head unpredictably and drink your huge large-man-beer right in front of me, deliberately blocking my way when I try to get past - back to the place I was in before - so that I start to hate everything about you, including the jumper you are wearing, which in happier circumstances I may have found comforting, but which now I am convinced was purchased in a boutique shop down a back lane for more than the cost of the wool, the sheep that made the wool, and the farm that reared the sheep that made the wool?

What I resent the most about you is the back of your head. It betrays your arrogance and your insensitivity: it's not looking - it's not seeing - it's not even listening to the music. It's just holding your head together like a bulldog clip.

The couple next to me suggest that I should take your hat off and hurl it backwards to the bar so you would have to trawl through the crowd (excuse me, excuse me, sorry, excuse me) and fetch it back to cover your pin head. But you're a big bloke and I'm a small woman and you realise that just as much as I do, which is why I drop my chewing gum on your vintage converse shoes and do a little twisty thing with my foot when I pretend to accidentally stumble onto you on my way out.

You'll also find that you have a new entry in the Guiness Book of World Records, too. Same category, though. "World's Largest..."

So, congratulations. I guess I'll see you at the next gig I go to. Before then, I'm going to befriend your colleague, the World's Strongest Man, who (I predict) will not enjoy prats in expensive jumpers and will take whatever action he deems fit in the circumstances to remove the back of your head to some other place, where I am not.

(And yes, everyone, I am getting older. And yes I did notice that The Corner won't allow smoking in the venue anymore. I obviously whole-heartedly approve of that decision, and did briefly consider writing a letter to add to what I hoped was a groundswell of public support. I also wondered why they don't serve cups of tea at the venue, whether they were mandated under health and safety regulations to sell earplugs, and why on earth they have to start gigs so late when clearly we all need to be in bed soon because the morning is the best part of the day).

Last night was the cast and crew screening of our film, I Could Be Anybody. We cheated and invited a rowdy bunch of friends and supporters as well. It was a brilliant night, with lots of drinkies and (it gets a bit gourmet here) iced vo vos. Seriously. Are we not the PEAK of cuisine?

There were three screenings of the film, due to the fact that there were too many bums and not enough seats, so we got to witness various different audience reactions to a film previously only ever watched by two people at a time (usually the same two people). Until yesterday, I Could Be Anybody had only been watched in its finished form by Rita, me, Stew, the DVD angels at Eskimo Productions, targeted family members, and my housemates. Prior to that, in its more raw form, it had been watched by half a dozen other people, from Fez the sound magician to Marcus the colour-fiddling guy. So in a sense, this was the "outing" of our short film.

The screening was at a gorgeous little theatrette called the Erwin Rado cinema (see here) and thanks to everyone who turned up, helped out, and assisted in eradicating our surplus of tick tock biscuits, iced vo vos, and snake lollies.

Photos will be up on our site just as soon as we've broken into the producer's car (where her keys are currently secured), located the camera, re-acquired basic motor skills, and managed to get home without hurting ourselves.

Our cast and crew screening is tonight.

Lots of people are coming. Lots. Many. More than two.

Hold me.

So tomorrow night is our cast and crew screening in Fitzroy. I'm reminded again of how bizarre my life is when I find myself asking questions using words I don't understand to people I barely know, the answers to which could well determine what it is people actually see when they come to see our film.

Did you know, for instance, that there are heaps of different ways to watch a film on a TV? There are heaps of different DVD players and heaps of different sorts of TVs and projectors and there are things called "modes" and "formats" and WHY WASN'T ALL THIS SORTED OUT IN A MEETING SOMETIME IN THE LATE EIGHTIES?

I was watching our film today in my loungeroom when it ocurred to me that I must have lost quite a lot of weight since I was in that film. I was thinking, "Hang on, is this a movie about a fat girl? Is this a comment on the representation of women in the media?" I mean, I was reeeeally wide. Then (with considerable relief) I realised I was in "wide" mode.

Mental note: remember not to put film in wide mode tomorrow night. Actors may take offence.

Reading update: Sydney Writers' Festival fast approaching and I'm a fraction (geddit?) of the way through Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, which is a book full of deliciously outdated expressions and vast overuse of the exclamation mark. It's also fascinating because it's about a guy who treats every moment in life as an opportunity for an experiment (social or scientific). Including dreams. He decides he wants to work out what dreams are like, so in his own dreams he sits there going, "ah, this bit of my dream is clever. See what my subconscious is doing there? That's most intriguing".

This is my favourite bit so far, which is an aside during a description of the kinds of things he would argue with fellow students about at university:

"I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something that they didn't believe - like the time we got into an argument as to whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that that wasn't the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head".

Of course you did. You had to.

Here's to nerds.

Where would we be without them?

Us. Where would you be without us?