Stand and Deliver!

Clearly, I've been neglecting this blog! In the past six to eight months, my association with the national broadcaster ended (though not because I became too old or “not contemporary enough”); I‘ve published a joke book; I’ve become gainfully employed by the Macquarie Radio Network as part of their digital radio/podcasting concern, providing for them a comedy show (called Radio Ha Ha, co-hosted with Tammy Tantschev), a music news show (called World Café) and a science show (called Why Is It So?, featuring scientists Dr Angus Gray-Weale and Mary Gordon); I’ve been invited to join the nominating panel for the comedy prize of the Helpmann Awards; I was approached to help devise, and present, a comedy appreciation course at the
2006 Melbourne International Comedy Festival (entitled Comedy Appreciation? Don't Make Me Laugh!) where I also had the opportunity to be on the judging panel of the national Raw Comedy final and the national Class Clowns final.

But do you think I can get around to blogging about this stuff?

No way. Just not addicted to spending that much time online, in front of my computer anymore.

And then someone — my friend Emma Driver — switches me onto MySpace and before I know it, I’ve set up a page and suddenly, it’s back to not going to bed until the early hours and wanting to log on just to check the hits I’m getting and the links being made.

That’s not the worst of it, though, oh no. Now I’ve even got a new MySpace blog. But don’t start refering to me as “Arthur ‘Two Blogs’ Jackson” just yet, because, if anything, I kind of feel like I’m a parent with two kids, afraid that I’m going to favour one over the other. Already, I consider the MySpace blog as — well, the runt of the litter. Why should it demand my attention when this first-born blog clearly is the pride of the family? But what if, like some wayward hoyden or hussy upon whom the responsibility of parenthood has come unexpectedly and unwanted, I merely neglect them both?

Perhaps there ought to be a cyber equivalent of DoCS, prepared to confiscate blogs that aren’t receiving the care and attention they deserve. But then — consider the ramifications: what if this blog became a ward of the State, to be fostered out to some family professing a vocational drive to taking care of such neglected sites. Sure, you’d hope it would be well-maintained by whomever was given responsibility for it. But what if it was one of those co-dependent pervy couples, where the woman turns a blind eye to the man’s (or an older sibling’s) abuse? Years from now, this blog would be a sadistic bully, a serial killer, a rapist or a city office worker who buys, copulates with and kills rodents… but, through the help of a sympathetic jury, would get off somewhat lightly on account of the mis-treatment suffered at my and subsequent foster blogger’s hands…

It just doesn’t bear thinking about, really.

Postscript:

It’s exactly as I feared: you cannot serve two masters — or two blogs — sufficiently. After I wrote most of this entry, I popped over to my MySpace blog and found myself commenting on this entry there. In the process, I made a joke there that was too good not to appear on this, my favourite blog, and had to go back and re-write bits of this one to include it here. I’m already sliding down the slippery slope of infinite regress…

Although, the joke was the “Arthur ‘Two Sheds’ Jackson” reference, which I’d just better comment further upon for the sake of train-spotters: I’m not actually “Arthur ‘Two Blogs’ Jackson” because I actually went and started another blog. I’d only be “Arthur ‘Two Blogs’ Jackson” if I thought of starting the second, but never did, and then got bogged down talking about two blogs when there's only one and it was irrelevant to my work anyway but because it kept getting mentioned I’d want to get rid of that as well…!

Oh, and by the way, here’s the cover of the joke book. It’s published by New Holland Publishers (not that you’d know it from their bastard website). It’s still in print, so order a copy from your favourite bookshop (whose person in charge would have stopped re-ordering it some months ago!) Or e-mail me and I’ll charge you significantly less than the cover price, and autograph it as well!