Because I’m under medical advice to rest, ice, compress and elevate a busted ankle, there’s not a lot of activity to report from this end of Downunder at the moment except that I am BORED! So I’ve idly wandered the wwwebz, and among all the flotsam and jetsam that’s washed up on the littoral beach, I stumbled across a bright pearl that illustrates the COVID situation here in Oz almost perfectly.
The artwork above belongs to Jess Harwood, who you can find here.
Anyhoot, it’s probably no surprise that I’m a powerful owl. Exhibit one, my wise decision to avoid both Fakebook and Sinistergram back in the day. In doing so, I may have dodged the social media-cyborg dystopia that’s keeping people like Elon Musk in a high state of anxiety. Elon seems very keen to invent a way to get off the planet in a hurry (SpaceX), and to create vehicles that can be powered by solar radiation anywhere in the universe (Tesla). This is supicious enough, but if he were to begin growing potatoes in his own shit, trust me, it’s time to ditch the phone and head for the hills. But until and unless the AI lurking in my iPhone snatches control and turns me into a living battery, my life remains a no-FOMO zone. Hoot-hoot!
My wife is the Fairy Wren — and not just a Lovely Fairy Wren, nor even a Splendid Fairy Wren, but a Superb Fairy Wren. Not only does she wear clothes every day, god dammit, she is up at 4am on the treadmill six days a week to ensure she hits 20,000 steps every day. She does it to keep sciatica at bay, but also because I suspect she likes what she sees in the mirror. The difference between her and the ‘grammers is that she doesn’t spend the next six hours doing her make-up, shoe-horning herself into a thong, twisting herself into a pretty pretzel, and poring over Lightroom until the best of today’s four-hundred belfies is as perfect as a sun-kissed peach. No, she has a healthy breakfast and cracks on with her work; because Fairy wren’s are busy. She can’t get the coronavirus because she moves faster than a human sneeze. For my wife to become infected, the virus would need to get well ahead of her and lay a trap. I’ve been married to her for three hundred years, and I still have no idea what she’s doing next.
Anyway, what kind of bird are you? If I could add one more species to this list, it would be the Noisy Miners. These cocky, aggressive bastards bully other bird species out of the area until there’s nothing left but a grey-feathered tide. And then they turn on each other, and it becomes bicker, bicker, bicker all bloody day. Not working from home is a bit like that — I have 304 staff to manage at the moment, and even if only ten percent were problematic, that’s still six headaches every day of the week. Unfortunately, the number is more like 27% of the workforce, and (a bit like culling Miners) it forces me to be ruthless. I’ll be limping back into the fray tomorrow. I know the 27% will be waiting for me, squawking and fighting for my undivided attention. What Miners don’t know about Powerful Owls is that we prefer to sit alone, think things through, and fly into action only when we must. What they really should know is that when a Powerful Owl does take wing, it will eat a half-dozen Noisy Miners for breakfast.
