Possum gets serious

Possumcommitatus was THE indispensable Australian (statistical) politics blog last year. Looks like things are stepping up a notch. Hoorays!



Gosh there's been a lot of video posts here lately...

And the Tony Award for "Best Girl as a Guy" goes to...

This piece of Genius from The Onion was brought to my attention by Peter of the now defunct Glutbusters.

I'm proud to say that on our recent trip to the States we shared a lunch table with the Onion's appropriately hip, young, spunky marketing manager. So, you know, I am essentially responsible for this (leave credit card details in the comments kthx).


High School Tony Awards Honor Nation's Biggest Drama Club Nerds

"Dream a little meme of me(me)"

Who even knew that this wonderful website existed.

Muppet style patriotism

I likes it.



Via Snooze.

An post

I'm working from home today, which is both good and bad. Good because, well because I'm at home, but bad because when you work at home, there's no escape from work. That may sound like an obvious thing to say, but think about it for a minute.

If you have somewhere to go to work, an office, a separate building, you are physically placing yourself in a different environment. You are surrounded by workly possessions and accoutrements, you have other people around you doing work-type things, you dress in work clothes, you talk work talk, you 'meet', you organise, arrange and produce.

When you're at home, even if you have a special room, you're still at home which means that when you finish your work, there's no transition. You're already at home. There's no commute, no time to wind down, to remove worky thoughts from your mind.

Consequently, working from home, for all its glamorous connotations kinda sucks. It either leads to horrendous procrastination like blogging, or a soul-crushing slog that stretches well into the post-work time as your mind struggles to disconnect. I've long harboured a fantasy of getting a job on 'teh internets' so that I can be "somewhere else": down the coast, in the country. But to be honest I'm not sure how well that would go.

I know your no-shoe-wearing Xavier Rudd's hippies love to pour scorn on people who work in offices. "I'll never have an office job man, I'd rather be dead" etc. But I suspect it's because they've never tried working at home. Still.

In other news, I have succumbed to the evils of Facebook. As I mentioned in my previous post, there's been a lot of physical movement among friends of late and even those who are still in town seem to have been maintaining a steely radio silence. It's become a little eerie. Not to mention lonely.

And sure enough, like lifting a rock and discovering a nest of scuttling cockroaches, joining Facebook has uncovered all those missing people. They still exist! It's just that they only seem to socialise via the interwebs in this very specific place.

It reminds me of the Pete Seeger classic, "Where have all the flowers gone?". They've all gone to freakin' Facebook that's where.

So yes, I've joined the throng because I felt left out.

I still resent it though...