The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

It was a cold, crisp dry season day in The Bay. The rains had stopped, the warm wet season had morphed into the cold wet season, and it in turn had given way to The Dry. Clear blue skies, hard orange, red and black twilight sun rises and sets. Fog on the ground in the mountain gullies in the mornings, and cold hands and feet before dawn. Wetsuits in the water, and hot drinks afterwards. Some people around here call it Winter Time. It’s a term that has always been oddly incongruous for Australian conditions, and one of those colonial hang-ups we have carried over from the olden days and the cultural cringe. White fella came here from England and they didn’t like anything they saw. Because everything was better in England, Ye Olde Mother Country, that sent us overhere in abject misery and slavery to break our backs and kill ourselves for the greater glory and profit of the blokes holding the whips. So of course the land had to be remade in the image of the old country. Therefore ...

   No story, just a video by Australian Rogue Music band The Gall. Enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11iLU3cwlRw

Last night I was quietly and earnestly editing an educational music video for the local Young Christians Against Life On Earth group, of which I am an active and passionate member, when my partner Fiona brought home a bottle of Bailey's. I thanked her profusely, assuring her that she would live eternally in the here-after for invaluable services to humanity, and had a quiet glass of Irish cream. She went to bed, I did a bit of editing, then got up and got myself another glass. After a modest period of time I got up for another glass to sustain me in my toil for the promotion of Christian Values, such as Rent Extortion, Corporate Tax Avoidance and Disability Funding Axing. Imagine my surprise when I got to the bottle, slightly unsteadily from all my hard but rewarding labour, and found the bottle to be empty. Gone. Finished. Clearly a thief broke into our house while I was focussed on Spreading The Good Word through multi-media, and drained that bottle. Wait til...

A lot of people like to define either themselves or others, or both, in terms of whether they are “glass half full” or “glass half empty” people, a well-known modern metaphor to express inclination towards either optimism or pessimism. There’s a famous Far Side cartoon which expresses this brilliantly: there are four frames, showing four different people each. Each person is confronted with the same glass partially filled with water. The caption of the cartoon is “The Four Basic Personality Types”. The first frame shows The Happy Person, the optimist, with their hands exultantly in the air, and exclaiming “It’s half full!”. The second frame shows The Misery Guts, the pessimistic person, who stands in front of the glass with their shoulders sloping downwards and their face drooping, declaring in a dull monotone “It’s half empty”. The third person is The Scatter Brain, the confused and clueless person: the picture shows a confused looking person wringing their hands in existentia...

Just to pre-empt any feverish gleeful anticipation or righteous indignation from anyone at the presentation of subject matter of a sexual nature, I hate to disappoint any and all of the above but there’s no sex involved in this bit. Neither, I regret to say, potentially disappointing an even greater number of people, is football of any description. The balls I’m thinking of are tennis balls. And no, that is not like a tennis elbow. Tennis balls, more specifically, as a metaphor for economic theory and ideology. So if this appears boring to anyone now would be a good time to go and order another beer, have sex in the toilets or go smoke crack in the bushes outside. Please be my guest. The other day I was running an activity for kids involving tennis balls. Running activities for kids is my job, it’s what I do for a living. This particular activity involved kids working together in groups of six people to build a functional catapult-style mini siege weapon and shoot ballistic...

The wind blew across the speargrass, waving indolently. It had been coming from the west for a long time now, and had progressively sucked all the moisture and life out of the land. The grass was thin and yellow, the trees were spindly and struggling, and the creeks were dry, reduced to puddles of mud. Most importantly, the animals had disappeared. Gure and Lana sat near the fire, not far from their mum who was pounding grass seeds into flour to make into bread. There wasn’t much of it around anymore. They looked out over the grasslands to the group of people approaching slowly from the distance. Even from here they could sense their dejection in their sloping shoulders, their shuffling step, their arms carrying only unused spears. ‘They didn’t get anything’, Lana said. ‘No’, said her brother, ‘it doesn’t look like it ey.’ They stared at the adults as the women stood up slowly, their arms motionless by their side. The men walked into the campsite, looking at the groun...