Wednesday stuff and items

 

1)  The Queen has a dog called Gryffindor!

2)  We have just taken possession of some very exciting advances.

3) And we have died and gone to heaven, or, to put it anther way, our Faber colleague Jarvis Cocker reads Oliver Jeffers.* 

*There is an unconfirmed report that in the late nineties one Onion handmade a T-shirt that said JARVIS across the... well ... the chest area, in large fuzzy letters. But she didn't wear it to the Pulp concert at Festival Hall, because that would have been deeply uncool. If Mr Cocker ever visits our offices as part of being generally AT LARGE, we will scrub this footnote, pretend it never happened and lounge in doorways trying to look sophisticated and largely uninterested.

Baby, it's cold outside

How cold and wet it is. There may be hail, and even snow not very far away.

The House is full of semi-folded umbrellas, and newspapers soaking up the rain from the umbrellas, and people wearing fingerless gloves circumnavigating the umbrellas and newspapers.

But there are heartwarming glimmers amid the gloom.

Some are in the shape of Troubletwisters e-cards,

... an Onion's special warming winter wardrobe*,

... and some brand new winter reading.

Look at the glow cast on that table! There's nothing like a special finish to brighten up a winter's day in lieu of actual sunshine**.

POD, by Stephen Wallenfels
The Paradise Trap, by Catherine Jinks
The Shattering, by Karen Healey
Sensitive Creatures, by Mandy Ord

Meanwhile, certain peripatetic Onions enjoy a very different view.

*The Onion would like to dedicate her new unicorn jumper to Margo Lanagan.
**Pleasingly, but somewhat inconveniently for the integrity of this post, the sun has just decided to appear over the House. But it's still cold.

Tuesday stuff and items

Welcome back!
It's the NEW year! A term bandied about with something approaching abandon in the lead-up to Christmas in the House of Onion. And now the new year is upon us, so we are buckling down to all those tasks we gleefully surrendered in the old year.

We trust you all unwrapped lots of lovely books for Christmas and had time to get some of them sandy at the beach or crumpled on the plane or soggy in the bath or lost under the couch cushions...

Here are some things that have happened while we were sleeping eating drinking reading.

• Nicki Greenberg stormed the castle - when we say castle here, we mean the New Yorker.
  
  
• Hot hot hot.
  
  
• A blue moon!
  
  
• Thunder! Lightning! Fireworks!
  The old year went out with a sizzle and a bang and the new year came in with the whisper of rain. And then there was some more spectacular banging - like this forked lightning in North Fitzroy, video taken by an Onion Sympathiser.

• Shane Watson finally made his first Test hundred (just).
  
  
• Some very very pleasing items arrived in the House:

And while we were merrily celebrating our achievements for the year, of course, as ever there was cake.*





*Many thanks to the Christmas cake-maker who prepared this cake on the other side of the river (there’s another side to the river?) and successfully negotiated the obstacle course that is pre-Christmas Punt road traffic and transported it all the way to leafy West Brunswick. A triumph!

A rearguard advance

Look at the exciting thing that arrived this morning, missing yesterday's photo op by a whisker.




Clearly this book does not have a punctuality fairy, perhaps it has an always-arrives-just-late-enough-to-make-a-grand-entrance fairy.