Oh, Joe (Jackson and Hockey)

I read today that hearing just a few bars of one song can evoke a thousand memories.  I don't know about a thousand, but yesterday when I was driving around I did hear a song that evoked a few less than pleasant ones.  That song, my friends, was 'Is She Really Going Out With Him?' by Joe Jackson.  I love Joe Jackson's singing voice; hell, the bloke could sing the contents of the phone book and I'd be in rapture.  I love the way the song mentions staring in disbelief at some women's choices 'while my coffee grows cold'.  It's a great image and seems to sum up despair and hopelessness.  I remember hearing that song at a school dance.  It was straight after the boy I liked asked another girl to go with him.  I remember feeling disbelief because it had been my firm stance this boy liked me.  ME!  For a few months, he had been shooting me glances across the playground.  When he started at our school, I was strolling o'er the quadrangle and my class wag called out, 'Hey, Simone!  He likes you!'  He was pointing to the young stud-muffin who had recently started to sprout underarm hair.  I noticed his underarm hair at the swimming pool and almost swooned because it meant he was growing up, and I didn't have to consider myself a pathetic cougar type (I was a little older than he).  I actually don't think cougars are pathetic at all, but I didn't want to think I was desperate going for a boy who hadn't opened the door to puberty just yet.  But then, one night at a school dance, he asked another girl to go with him.  I sat across the dance floor on one of those uncomfortable molded plastic seats, just wondering what the total fuck.  Up to then, the signs had been pretty strong that it was me he fancied.  Jesus, I had even gone so far as to fashion the letters of his name in that glow-in-the-dark glow putty and stick them onto my dressing table mirror.  I believed this action would have some talismanic effect.  Ladies, if you're thinking of trying this, don't bother.  Use the glow-putty for another, more useful activity.  Maybe to stop a draft or plug up a mouse hole.  And in the midst of my misery that night at the dance, the record (yes, it was records back then) given a spin was Joe Jackson's 'Is She Really Going Out With Him'.  So glum was my 14yo self, I couldn't ruefully chuckle at the Universe's totally fucked up sense of humour and timing.

Tony (Sc)Abbott has cut funding to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Aid.  How bloody wonderful - NOT!  And in the meantime, there is apparently to be a visit from the Cambridges.  This Royal visit costs the taxpayer money in sundry items such as security.  I have nothing against the young couple at all; indeed, I rather like them.  But when Abbott and Hockey are going on a slash and burn operation like some rabid psychos trying to get snakes out of a cane field, surely there is a better way to spend money that would normally go to the royal visit?  Particularly when a quoted ballpark figure I heard was one million dollars.