Time Waster by Emmjay
Over at our friends’ place at Crikey, they ran a competition about whether Canberra was wonderful or the armpit of the Nation:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2013/10/21/is-canberra-the-worst-city-in-australia/
My Entry didn’t place (how surprising), but I liked the idea of a succinct take on our National Capital – and stuff them for a laugh ! Here it was:
Canberra – Remandberra
Lest I be criticised because of a perceived bias against our Nation’s hapless capless, let me first say that there are some extremely pleasant and cheerful folks who dally there on their way to somewhere significant. I think I just made that up to create a false sense of balance.
They allegedly hold massive art extravaganzas in The National Gallery. People go in droves but few return. It’s like a cubist Bermuda Triangle.
But that’s it for Canberra. It’s a place that people drift into – the same way as they do in a remand centre.
Canberrans have the appearance of mice that have just received invitations to the Snake’s Picnic Day. Things will soon get far better or much worse – depending on the caprice of what is laughingly referred to these days as “a career move”.
And like a remand centre, Canberra is a place with dodgy food and even more suspect travelling companions. I say “Take a return ticket, a cut lunch and watch your back”.
Emmjay of the Pig’s Arms.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Dull dormitory
Groaning with stillborn dreams
The sleepers must awake
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I don’t wish to quibble, BUT a Haiku has to have five syllables for the first line, seven for the second line and five for the third line. Your second line has six. Tut tut.
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Bugger!
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There was a Venise passing through
Who felt prompted to give this review
I don’t like to quibble
But it seems that a syllab-
Le Has dropped so it’s not a Haiku
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VOICE: Yaiz, that about sums it up.
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…and Voice plays the Trump. A murmer runs through the crowd. Is this the end or just the beginning.
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Oh, how deliciously homeric, Voice!
A whole syllable apostrophised! And the two upper case Hs in the last line! Pure genius!
The laurel crown of poetry is yours!
All Hail the Hallowed voice of Voice!
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Googles, our Voice is the Alpha and the Omega of syllabotchery!
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Japanese poets
create Haiku like Twitter
For high minded types
But Googlehoover
miscounted the syllables
And buggered it up
Oh Buggeration!! I’ve done it again haven’t I?
Expressing yourself
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic…..
Oh bugger, bugger, bugger!!!!!
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🙂
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In case that face is ambiguous, Gw, it is meant to signal appreciation.
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I’ve always thought of Canberra as a kind of whore offering her dubious pleasures to politicians, diplomats, architects and all the minor creatures that flutter and fluff about the great and good, in the vain hope that some one of them might lift her up out of the squalid and trivial life she currently leads. An eternal hope of redemption and the ascendence to motherhood and the nurturing of a nation.
So when I dropped in here and saw this I thought of John Ford’s ’tis Pity She’s A Whore”. It’s not original but it did seem apposite;
“Lost, I am Lost! My fates have doomed my death.
The more I strive, I love; the more I love,
The less I hope. I see my ruin, certain.
What judgement or endeavors could apply
To my incurable and restless wounds
I thoroughly have examined, but in vain.
Oh, that it were not in religion sin
To make our love a god and worship it!
I have even wearied heaven with prayers, dried up
The spring of my continual tears, even starved
My veins with daily fasts; what wit or art
Could counsel, I have practiced. But, alas,
I find all these but dreams and old men’s tales
To fright unsteady youth; I’m still the same.
Or I must speak or burst. Tis not, I know,
My lust, but tis my fate that leads me on.
Keep fear and low fainthearted shame with slaves!
I’ll tell her that I love her, though my heart
Were rated at the price of that attempt.”
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Saw Turner there not long back
Had lunch afterwards
Locals talked of bogans
All artificial, just like the lake.
Traffic lights said U-Turn permitted.
Just near bull dust castle
Pommie High Commission on our left
Drove around in circles.
I’m on a road to nowhere.
Cross state border says “Welcome to NSW”
I’m in the real world again
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I wrote a reply yesterday this ought to be a song … and surely I think now the blues except is that the blues to arrive at a happy destination? No baby done do you wrong at the end. Your bleeding heart was not left on the big sign that says ‘Canberra’ at its gazetted boundary. Nothing says you done any-one out of their provider at that cross road. Still a great lyric. 🙂
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OK: I’ll have a shot at the competition: Haiku (NB: working on the fact that Canberra has three syllables .)
Cold winter sorrow,
When Canberra town freezes
Civil servants sleep.
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Fascinated am I by the alliterative – not sure of the word – use of c and s. The sounds and looks created by those repetitions. Nothing could be made more of a declaration. And it’s seasonal, clever. 🙂
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‘SHOE: Gratified am I that you like it. Alliteration is what I was striving for. I loves ya.
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I loves ya back for that.
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Canberra, capital of our nation,
Where tax evaders undergo incarceration,
It’s not Melbourne,
And it’s sure not Sydney,
It’s nuthin, really!
Used to be a sheep farm,
‘til our founding fathers voted it in.
Since then, it’s all political spin.
‘shoe learnt to swim there,
then Jesus saved her skin, there.
Viv thought she’d go out for a meal.
G.O thought the condoms were a steal.
Voice couldn’t be heard for the din at the Yum cha.
Big M just carried on like a galah.
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The Big Galah! Could be the cure for Canberra – a Big Thing.
Big M
Ink slinger extraordinaire on behalf of Foodge
Great big purse carrying nancy boy poofter male nurse.
Greenwood fan
Advises George Theodoridis on novels about Delphic females
Lobs entries into Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde quizzes
As a go at poetreee
He saves babies in his spare time.
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60 words and you used the word Canberra including towards elevating Big M at its town limits. Excellent acrostic, Voice.
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Thanks, Voice, lovely words which I shall treasure.
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helvi commented roundabouts and no people… 🙂 …my original memory of a Canberra shopping complex is a boxed-in allotment of glass and some trees in a concrete facade/surround, but with so few people I felt confused how there were any people enough here to have shopping there as we know it. Without any money to spend there I wasn’t in that swim anyway. It was 100+ degrees in the shade that day. That explained no people I supposed. Not on the outside.
Armpits are so discredited. I will never understand the use of that curvature in comparative analysis of good and bad.
Be that as it might, valid comparison or example of the frigidity of our nation towards body odour that is natural perspiration…so confusing, the armpit ie with the relatively few conditions of the body that cause stench worse than an overload of deodorants and lotions people use on their anatomy to drive away and inconvenience the majority of the population.
Thus characteristics of our nation exemplified by our national capital (what a unifying symbol of togetherness) are beginning to emerge recalled by piglets and piglets alike.
shades of Barry Creyton…
http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/mavis-bramston-show-series-1/clip1/
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Good one Shoe:
Yes, bring back hairy armpits. I think it were the yanks that thought body odour was offensive, even though, natural pheromones should be nurtured instead of deodorised.
We are meant to chose our partners by sniffing out compatible and friendly armpits . How can we, when armpits smell of deodorants (Pine-o-Clean) etc.?
I have heard, that at Double Bay there are men now that do Brazilian waxes. Talk about drum-sticks!
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Pine-o-Cleen haha…my sentiments exactly. Unfortunately the dominance of a group of the biochemists who failed to get out and try a different profession when their degrees did not pay off for them in fields of serious study has us all suffocated by the silliest social argument of all, that it is a moral departure to not soak ourselves in a lotion or potion now we have abandoned the swinging of wotsits in public places so as to rid ourselves of each other and the plague.
Have to run to sort out a trap for relocating possums… bye possum. Smooch and one for helvi as she is around at your side there 😉
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One of our first adventures to Canberra was with the Holden Special station wagon with slatted wooden blinds. We stopped along Lake George which at the time had water. I remember walking through the original Canberra which had a colonial looking building and some shops. There were some people walking about who, from memory, looked a bit self conscious as if they feared a question from strangers asking if this was Canberra.
Was there also a shop named ‘The Tool-shed’, selling strange lingerie and adult literature including a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover? I went upstairs. I did not see any Black Decker power saws. There were rows of desperate looking rolling pins disguised as ‘marital aids’ as well.
Before the entrance into Canberra we did pass along a wide avenue which had welcome shade, compliments of the many trees, that some foresighted architect had planted some years before. I remember, (it was along time ago) going to the War Museum and staring at a dummy soldier dressed in combat gear and with rifle aimed at the enemy, lying in real sand. It was made to look as realistic as possible.
The day was topped off with a visit to the science building which the Sydney Morning Herald had described as one of the architectural wonders of the time. It was a round building resembling a flying saucer.
Can I now get FM’s black polo shirt?
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One of the first tracks I played on air was LaVern Baker’s ‘Slow Rollin’ Mama’ from Dick Tracey. What a fantastic songster Ms Baker. Yes, the number is on Youtube, but concede the topic is Canberra-wonderful or the armpit of Australia. Those images of our capital, believe it stood out for me Gez years on later from my dunking in the lake. My own first sight of it then that I recall was of aisles of lacy underwear with holes in it. 😉
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No Gez, but nice try !
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Have you opened a Twitter Acount?!
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Um, no.
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I feel much the same about Canberra, but I’ve had a vague feeling I should get around to re-evaluating it one day, ever since I met someone at a French film watching expedition to at the NSW Art Gallery who travels there regularly on a purely voluntary basis.
Perhaps it is slowly developing a heart, a very difficult thing for a city deliberately designed without one. Bloody town planners – difference and progress are not at all the same thing.
I must say I also had my first Yum Cha there so long ago that Sunday Yum Cha brunch was only just becoming the standard way to catch-up with a largish group of people. Nothing close to as good as what you get in Sydney though.
(Acknowledgement in advance to Sea Mendez for the rest of my comment.)
Max 150 words rule. Ha! No-one’s going to impose any silly rules on
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Voice, that last one is a killer. Thanks for the major chortle 🙂
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Been there four times. I liked it. Food good, museums and art stuff all great. Got to see Blue Poles in the flesh – it did blow me away with its fantastic size and colour and feelings. It is a pity is it so far off the highway as would go there more often. I nearly got lost but told my daughter we were just doing some suburban sight seeing. The road system is simple but in reality it isn’t.
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Canberra is where I fell in the lake. Big signs all over the lake said don’t swim in the lake. That’s why I tear up when I think of Canberra. I love Canberra, the place of my first protest. I learned to swim there.
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You fell in the lake? Was the water really wet, as they claim it is?
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That’s because God saved you Sandshoe. All of us are God’s children. God bless you.
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I promise you, Gez I was assessed by the friends of my parents who were my hosts for that summer holiday. The lake is wet. Many curious people have made that enquiry.
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Hung, it was truly a result of inspiration that I imaged the Australian Crawl and headed for shore.
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I think I might have been there once but could not find it. Did it have lots of round-a-bouts and suffering from an eerie silence?
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It is years since I had this unnerving experience. But, I remember being stunned by all the excellent roads and the lack of people and cars using them. I’m sure this city has lots of delicious dining and wining places, fabulous quiet and caring hotels, sophisticated politicians and loose living journos. It’s just that I didn’t see them. Ha!
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Yes, it is flooding back now. I saw a man crossing an empty highway. It was on a Sunday afternoon back in 2004. The street had a sign. ” Wrong Way,Go Back”. I am sure it was Canberra.
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Ha, ha! Precisely.
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That is certainly it in essence, Gez. You might wrest the prize from my ‘I learned to swim there’. 🙂
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We are neck and neck, truly I am sure, with Venise’s imagery of kissing the tarmac at Tullamarine on her return from there. 🙂
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PS: The reason I didn’t enter is because I’ve only ever been to Canberra once in my life. Such was the experience that I embarrassed my late husband by kneeling on the tarmac at Tullamarine and kissing it.
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God bless you Venise. You are truly someone to look up to in today’s heathen world. Your kissing of the tarmac signified your belief in God. We are all God’s children.
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Yes, yes Hung One On,
The smell of tar, the lure and subsequent steaming embrace of the loose women disguised as sweet Miss Bitumen. Oh, the joy.
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Grrrrrrr, snarl, grrrrr
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I read the results of this competition-but didn’t attempt to enter it. I was struck by the amount of winning entries whose writers took the line of…”I love Canberra, with all its eccentricities, I love its intimacy AND I WANT TO KEEP YOU PROLES OUT OF THE PLACE!”
Would you like to have your comment surrounded by these slackers?
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No! Intimacies? All I see is roads and round-abouts…no people. The round-abouts make us dizzy, and we end up driving towards Snowy instead of back home…
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