Where we've been

We have been...

Doing this:

 

(so has Karen Healey)

 Savouring this:

Eating these:

 Admiring these:

Waiting for this:

Knitting this:

Laughing at this:

 

But mostly doing a lot of this:

We will be back to regularly scheduled programming soon!

So it's Grand Final eve...

No one here but us cats.

 

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming...

... to bring you a special tribute.

Today, Cameron Mooney announced that he will be retiring from the Geelong Football Club at the end of this season.

We knew it was coming - but hearing him say it is different matter. There were sniffles in the House of Onion.*

Mooooooooney

Moondog

Moo

The Big Hairy Cat

He goes by a lot of names. He was suspended for a lot of matches.

He grew a lot of hair and kicked a lot of goals.

He brought energy and passion and toughness to the club.

And he brought the love; Mooney always brought the love.

Here he is sharing the love with Gary.

Here he is sharing the love with Steve.



Here he is sharing the love with Matthew.

Here he is sharing the love with Wojo, Jimmy and a Big Hairy Seal.

Here he is sharing the love with Alan Didak.

Here he is sharing the love with Brenton after Geelong lost That Horrible 2005 Semi-final when Horrible Nick Davis kicked all those Horrible Goals.**

And here he is sharing the love with his son after winning the 2009 Grand Final.

Oh Mooney - we'll miss you! Thank you for everything.

* To be strictly honest, most denizens of the House were sniffle free. Most Onions don't even know who Cameron Mooney is - but the two who do care enough for everyone. (And if denizens of the House don't like it we'll jumper-punch you a few times, then hug you after the game.)

** It's okay Moons - only two years until you win a flag. We are Geelong.

Pick-me-ups

Sometimes in the aftermath of earthquakes and tsunamis and floods and countries or nuclear reactors teetering on the brink of meltdown, we all need a good pick-me-up. And often it's hard to identify exactly what pick-me-up might work.

The glorious weather in Melbourne at the moment might be enough - especially after the summer-that-never-was. Or maybe a slice of the Cake-Maker Virtuoso's spectacular Rhubarb upside-down cake might do it. Or a nice crunchy new season apple. Or a one-point win for your football team in the opening round of the season. Or a good book (I wonder if there are any of those around here?). Or of course, that old fall back, a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down.

But if none of these are working for you, here are some items that might just do the trick.

In Melbourne - what ho! A Children's Book Festival this weekend at The Wheeler Centre featuring loads of our favourite authors and illustrators. What an excellent idea that is. Hurrah!

In Sydney - Team Unicorn and Team Zombie are shaping up for a good old-fashion feud. Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld (Team Zombie) are set to showcase their debating prowess against the finely honed skills of Margo Lanagan and Garth Nix (Team Unicorn). So roll up, roll up to see if the score can be settled once and for all. Kick-off is at 6pm on Thursday, at Kinokuniya Bookstore.

On the interwebs - over at Meanjin Mandy Brett's wonderful essay Stet by Me: Thoughts on Editing Fiction. We are highly tempted to steal it and add it to our occasional series, What Do Editors Do All Day. Instead, we will simply say, thank you, Mandy. You made our day with this thoughtful, inspiring, eloquent and insightful essay about what it is we do all day, and why we do it.

And if for some unfathomable reason these items don't float your boat, perhaps what you need is a goodly dose of Maru.

Going, going... gone.

Once again we find ourselves with all kinds of football sadness today. And please do not be telling us to cheer up just because there's a whole extra grand final this year. That provides no solace. No solace at all. None. Zero. Zip.

So, clearly we need a little something to distract ourselves. Preferably something a little word nerdy. A little list-based - because we do love a list.

Thank goodness for a lovely long list of supernatural collective nouns because everyone loves a collective noun.* Don't they?

Do we feel better now? No, not really. What do you suppose the collective noun for cats without a coach or a favourite son** might be?

***

If anyone has any distracting items that might help us shake these football blues, please send them, post haste.

* Thanks to Bookshelves of Doom for helping us find this wonderful distraction in our hour of need.

** Perhaps this was why it happened - maybe all those years of being called the favourite son convinced Gaz that his calling was to be among other Suns.

***Photo shamelessly swiped from Virginia, whose vision is probably too blurred with tears to notice.

Friday stuff and item

It seems we only have one item...

Oh, football, how we love you, let us count the ways. Gaz. Moo. Scarlo. Jimmy. Johnno. Mayor of Geelong. Stokesy. Joels. Pods. Tomahawk. Enright. Dasher. Trav. Wojak. Okay, we'll stop counting now before this gets quite out of hand.

Readers who follow football will understand that it is a very nervous day in the House, what with the big game tonight. Whatever can we do to distract ourselves?*

Perhaps there's something we can find on our shelves, an item we may be able to draw inspiration from. Oh, look - is that Tom Harley, former captain of the Cats, Standing Tall on the cover of that rather handsome book nestled in our bookshelves?** Yes, indeedy. And is his book dispensing advice about confidence, teamwork and learning to lead? Yes, yes it is. Well, we feel better already.

Go Cats! Go Cats! Go Cats!

*Well, whatever else besides send two books to the printer - but that's hardly a nerve-calming exercise.

** We are EXTREMELY grateful to our former (now flightless) Cake-maker Extraordinaire for making this excellent item, and for making it available to us.

Well would you look at that...

It appears that our ask has been answered; someone has written a poem about Gary Ablett's possible move to the Gold Coast.




*editor sidles from the room making no further comment*

Phew

Bomber Thompson: "To St Kilda, footy sucks sometimes ... we were very, very lucky and we're very proud of what we've done."

Go cats.

A glitch in the matrix...

So. Here. We. Are. All atremble. So much so we have to interrupt our regular programming (again).

Apologies to all those looking forward to the final installment of our current Introducing... series. But who doesn't love a good dose of antici...






pation.

Stay tuned next week for our final (for now) welcome to the House of Onion.

Instead join us on a nostalgic* trip down memory lane (made in a desperate attempt to distract ourselves from the BIG GAME).

As Steph Bowe so eloquently puts it, sometimes: It sucks to be a teenager.

Sure, I remember times when I was all, "Be still my heart and cease thy frenzied beating..." because the Object of My Desire tossed five syllables (yes, I was a syllable-counter) in my general direction. And yes, I am fortunate enough to be able to recall occasional triumph on the sports field and the odd quiet moment of academic pride (as long as nobody else found out). And, it's true, I was soothed by the obsessive satisfaction of songs on repeat in my mind.

But I also still have in my heart the memory of that terrible, terrible despair, the loneliness, the fear, the almost incapacitating self-loathing and the red rage that found its way to my very fingertips.

And yes, I kept a diary. And I'm sure many of the entries would have had the same feel and tone as these heart-achingly raw diary entries extracted from Cringe: Toe-Curlingly Embarrassing Teenage Diaries, Letters and Bad Poetry (Sarah Brown, ed).

I'll never know though. And not because I destroyed it, which many people do once they surface and find themselves on a more even keel. No. I'll never know because I wrote in CODE and I am now completely unable to decipher it.

And I was so excited when, during the clean-up before the sale of my family home, I found my fat, well-thumbed, red-and-white diary with a broken lock. Pages and pages of cramped writing squashed into every line. I was insatiably curious to revisit that time of my life, even though I knew so much of it would be excruciating. But when I opened it, I was devastated to discover my heartfelt outpourings were lost to me. Impenetrable.

It's hardly the matrix, in fact there are no numbers at all. It's all coded-abbreviations and made-up words. And recognisable cross-references and cross-outs. Lots of cross-outs. And it seems to be in the third person. Sigh.

And, I wonder if this inaccessible code is actually an appropriate representation of my teenage years because, often, that's what it felt like - that there was a code to life, and everybody else seemed to be in on it, and I just couldn't quite decipher it. Or if I did have moments of clarity, they were fleeting and then the code would slip suddenly from my reach again.

Oh, I am so glad I never have to re-live those years, and I'm also glad I can remember with empathy. And perhaps that's one of the reasons why this Onion landed in a world where YA is celebrated.

* Ha! The power of nostalgia, hey? The best days of our lives? Sure.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this public service announcement

Go Cats!

Photo via an Alert cat fan

Regular programming will resume shortly.



NB This message was not approved by everyone in the House of Onion, but there are times when the only right thing to do is railroad all opposition. This is one of those times.

On Hallowed Turf

Regular followers may have gleaned that some of the Onions have a penchant for a certain form of football that involves blue & white hooped felines demonstrating their athletic prowess on a large field with four posts at each end.*

However, we** are also inordinately fond of the fine gentleperson's game commonly known as cricket. And the down-to-the-wire First Test in the battle for the Ashes in Cardiff certainly justified our faith in the five-day game.***

The prospect of encountering an Australian eleven without the blockbuster players of yore (as an AFL commentator might put it, the Aussie team was missing 'your Warnes, your Gilchrists and your Lees') had England fans salivating. But we all know what pride goes before - a solid if uninspired first innings followed by an inability to bowl Australia out, and then a desperate last stand to pull a draw out of the jaws of defeat.

The Australian team might have been lacking a few key protagonists, but the First Test had all the hallmarks of a best-seller: drama, suspense and edge-of-your-seat-action, a plucky underdog, a willing villain, a thrilling climax... and the perfect set up for the sequel.

But why this sudden desire to wax editorial about cricket, you ask? No, it's not because Justine Larbalestier has been campaigning behind the scenes. It's because today, on the dawn (well it will be dusk here by the time it dawns there, but you know what we mean) of the Second Ashes Test at Lord's Cricket Ground, we are mightily chuffed to reveal that the House of Onion was recently featured at that most-hallowed of all grounds in St John's Wood. Yes indeedy.

Look. That's us. On the score board. At Lord's. Oh my.

How did this wondrousness come about, you ask? Well, to celebrate our 19th year of independence our (cricket-obsessed loving) fearless leaders Patrick & Robert hosted the first-ever Allen & Unwin Ashes Party and, indeed, why not do it at the Home of cricket!

As well as our humble cocky being proudly displayed on the Lord's score board, we believe the event included much conviviality AND a tour of the Long Room and the players' dressing rooms.

Colour us more than quietly envious.

*And as such we have had a quiet case of the glums this week. Ms Constable, we suspect you too may be recovering from a touch of the (heart-stopping) glums. Ms McNamara, though, is likely to be all sunshine and rainbows.

** Using the term 'we' loosely - as some in the House care not for cricket, football, rugby or any other activity where people run around in strange ways doing all sorts of odd things for inexplicable reasons.

*** If you are a cricket tragic AND you're on Twitter, we can recommend following Jonathan Agnew @aggerscricket for a spot of hilarity with a pinch of insider goss. Sample tweets:

True conversation. HRH 'I never listen to you Takes 10 mins for the score' Me grovelling, 'Thank you sir'

Its 2 O'clock...Harmy in squad...Flintoff dodgy knee...needs scan

Nice bloke Webber - loves cricket. Interviewed him at Edgbaston 2005.

A little something

Some things that are good on Monday:

• Meanjin's new blog, 'Spike' (Not only generally good, it also includes LOLcats and seems to be named for a vampire.)
• Barrack Obama reading Where the Wild Things Are
• The Guardian talking about parallel importation and territorial copyright. 'If it succeeds, Australia will be the largest book market to remove standard protections given to publishers and authors across the English-speaking world.'
  

Something that isn't so good on Monday:

• Getting to work to find an email that says: 'Poor tipping, you scored 2 points.' Sigh.

Something that is GENIUS ALL THE TIME:

• Gary Ablett

Let them (not) eat cake

We would show you photos of our latest cake-eating; however, the little cakes, they were of the brown-and-gold variety - and some of us have erased them from our memories, choosing to dream instead of the blue-and-white cakes we consumed last year.