Disclaimers: (a) I usually quite like Dave Grohl; (b) I have been known to be a music wanker myself on occasion. Back when I was younger.

Denton: So what's it like being a rock star?

Grohl: Well, sometimes it can be difficult being so full of music. I mean, I could be sitting talking to someone in a bar, but always listening in the background, thinking, ooh, that's an 18-inch, or that's an interesting drum loop they've got going.

Denton: Uh-huh

Grohl: It's like I'm an obsessive-compulsive or something! I'm just SO in tune with the music. It's really a bit weird just how musically gifted I am.

Denton: Yes?

Grohl: It can't be normal - the music just lives in me. I can't escape it! I'd like to, sometimes, sure. It's difficult to handle so much musical talent in one person. And other people do get jealous. But the music helps me handle these situations. I'm so full of it.

In my search for non-Schapelle-Corby-related news today, I stumbled across an opinion piece by media consultant Natasha Cica. Apparently, the debate over IVF has obscured larger questions of how people are valued in society today - having a child is squeezed into a narrow success/failure dichotomy.

I can sort of handle that argument, although Cica's logic is hardly watertight. What really got me was this sentence (which, you'll notice, needs considerable stretching to have relevance to IVF):

Downsizing and deregulation, plus the tulipmania in housing and household credit, have made people more anxious about holding economic position.

Tulipmania? I like to think I'm jiggy with the word on the street, but obviously I don't hang around with enough media consultants. My best googling suggests that tulipmania refers to the exorbitantly high prices paid for tulip bulbs in Holland around February 1637 (economic analysis here). OK.

So just who is Cica's article aimed at? Cute words are all well and good, but ideally they should carry some sort of meaning for the target audience.

A jury has found four Melbourne cops not guilty of appropriating $100K worth of marijuana. One of my friends was called up to serve on this jury, and if he hadn't been excused because of work, he was planning to say that he couldn't possibly serve on the jury because it was blindingly obvious the cops were guilty. As anyone who ever worked in a Melbourne nightclub would know. Well well well.

Meanwhile, my own inner jury has been debating the possible inclusion of new literary critical terms into my vocabulary. We already know synchronic and diachronic are out - but what of aporia and synecdoche?

In the case of R v aporia, aporia was found guilty of being both wankerish and useless. Aporia means a paradox or contradiction (two much better words right there), but I prefer its original Greek meaning: "difficulty of passing", from aporos, "impassable". Sounds uncomfortable!

The defendant in R v synecdoche has fared better. Even though it sounds like a feminine hygiene product, at least synecdoche captures a unique meaning: "A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor) or the whole for a part (as the law for police officer)" . I tried using this word last night after watching Star Wars, when people were talking about how Annakin's journey was the same as the Galaxy's - so, I thought maybe the character was a synecdoche for the society. I'm not sure if that's right though.

1. Clay and I went out to a seafood restaurant for dinner, and I thought I'd have the flounder with burnt butter, capers and lemon. Nice and simple. When the waiter unveiled the dish, however, it turned out to consist of not one but TWO entire fish, each one the size of my head. Bigger than my head - the size of my torso. The size of my torso after I'd finished eating two fish the size of my torso. You'll all be pleased to know this didn't stop me ordering banana mousse for dessert.

2. I went down to hire some DVDs from my local video store guy. He's a classic: tall, deep-voiced, always dressed in black and utterly deadpan. I took my two $3 DVDs to the counter, he looked up my membership on the screen. Keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the ground, and in the glummest possible tones, he said "Make it a fiver. Happy Birthday."

3. Liberal MP Petro Giorgiou went John Howard on long-term detention of asylum seekers. Go you good thing!

Lord knows, I've tried to be interested in Big Brother in every one of its five seasons. But this year I can't do it. The contestants are truly awful. They remind me of some of the kids from my high school: self-obsessed, indistinguishable and tightly wound up over their interpersonal dramas. Ooh, someone called someone else a bitch! She is such a slut! Etc. Even with my respect for Gretel, I just can't get involved.

Meanwhile, more snarking about the Age: factual errors, people! The worst was perhaps the item in the "10 things to do" column on Saturday reminding us all to go to the Kylie concerts this week. Bonus points there for the reporter being deaf, dumb and blind as well as insensitive. And then the television program bemoaned the absence of Terry Wogan from the Eurovision telecast, when in fact his ascerbic commentary was present to guide us through the tortured melodies, cleavage and hip-wiggling.

Pick the problem here. An Age article is headlined "Banks in $9bn card fee bonanza" and bylined "The hidden cost of credit to ordinary customers has more than doubled." It goes on to describe the remarkable increase in fees paid by non-business customers to banks at a time when credit card debt is at a record high. This article clearly has an implicit message that banks are bad and that customers should be pitied.

Lo and behold, half way down the article in a box sixteen-lines-high and nine-words-wide is a massive ad for Westpac's Altitude credit card - the very demon that has my finances in thrall.

The disjuncture between article and advertising is pretty rare for the Age, which has a nasty history of mixing promotional and editorial content (if you don't believe me, check the travel sections). It's probably just a matter of time before we start getting articles on how useful and empowering credit cards can be.

Journalism is really starting to get my goat.

I just did my first ever radio interview! In my capacity as spokesperson for the Public Transport Users Association, I was asked what I thought of new regulations imposing fines (over $500) on people who don't give up their seat for the elderly or pregnant women etc.

So, what do I think? In my heart of hearts, I think unenforceable laws such as these are abominations that bring the entire legal system into disrepute. That's a hangup from the "downloading music is theft" and "not buying a train ticket leaves young girls stranded" advertising campaigns that substituted moral blackmail for legal enforcement and made my blood boil.

But putting that boiling blood to one side, I can't see that these regs do any harm, and since they're getting heaps of publicity they might raise awareness of the need to behave nicely towards one another. Good manners don't cost anything.

Of course, if the aim is to make public transport more attractive to people, then improved services would be far more useful than warm, fuzzy, unenforceable standards.

I always get uneasy when people start debating the rights and wrongs of torture, a la the two opposing opinion pieces in today's Age. One, by Deakin Uni law academics Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke, claims that torture, an excellent information-gathering device, is allowed in those limited circumstances when it operates as a form of self-defence (which, in a deft logical sweep, includes defence of others. How other? One hostage? A thousand office workers who may possibly be a target? The world?). Meanwhile Jeff Sparrow is appalled at their callous arguments and their wildly hypothetical justifications, pointing out that the recent vogue for defences of torture is concurrent with a general retreat from international law. Sparrow makes some effective, if chilling points:

In the real world, torture rarely provides accurate information. As the US expert Douglas Johnson puts it: "Nearly every client at the Centre for Victims of Torture, when subjected to torture, confessed to a crime they did not commit, gave up extraneous information or supplied names of innocent friends or colleagues to their torturers." In other words, if Professor Bagaric and Dr Clarke encountered the sharp end of their "excellent information gathering device" (say, in a Saudi prison), they too would admit to knowing the whereabouts of each and every ticking time bomb about which their interrogators wanted to learn.

That's why the ritualised abuses of Abu Ghraib represent the reality of torture far more accurately than Bagaric and Clarke's fantasies. Lynndie England and Charles Graner brutalised those under their watch not with any direct intention of gaining information but to humiliate and terrify the prison population and, beyond it, the people of Iraq.

Probably the best bit of the whole exchange is the Spooner cartoon, which shows two hooded-and-gowned academics picking over the bloodied body of a torture victim. That perfectly captures my distate with high-minded arguments about ill-treatment of others. Maybe that's because I'm philosophically naive and hopelessly into human rights - I just can't buy these utilitarian formulas about "hurt one person possibly save two", which look particularly flimsy in light of the use of torture as humiliation. We have to look after our own humanity, and once we start torturing people we're in trouble.

Mostly harmless.

I made that joke as I walked out of the cinema last night, and immediately had two powerfully contradictory reactions to my own witticism. On the one hand, I was pretty pleased with myself. On the other hand, I had the instant, crushing realisation that I was not the only person to make that joke, that thousands of dorky Douglas Adams fans before me would have made precisely the same joke, all of them pretty pleased with themselves. That joke, I went on to think, was an egregious example of dad humour, dad humour that my actual dad would actually use unless even he shuddered at its utter corniness.

For those un-dorky un-dad types out there, "mostly harmless" is the two-word entry that the planet Earth gets from the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy in the book of the same name. They didn't include this information in the movie, probably because every little smart-ass like me would then use the joke mentioned above.

On the third hand, as Zaphod Beeblebrox would possibly say, at least the joke proves that I did remember something from the book. I'm starting to feel, like Nick Hornby, that I have forgotten every book I have ever read. With Adams, I remembered no characters, no plot, but a paltry one-liner. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

At 9pm on a Wednesday night, I'm usually ready for something pretty loopy. I Am Not an Animal is a brand-new British animated series, which appears to be about a bunch of talking animals who escape from their experimental facility and try to function in modern-day England. The set-up is surreal, if rich in possibility, and the animation unsettling - a kind of collage effect that jitters awkwardly.

There were some absolutely classic one-liners (every time I see a train whizz by from now on, I'm going to nod my head wisely and intone "THAT was the internet"), and I loved the fact that the animals are all complete yuppies, demanding chardonnay and constructing film reviews. The plot was unsatisfying and stilted, but that may be first-episode birth pains - the show is definitely worth a second look.

It's quite something to realise you fall directly into the centre of a new magazine's target audience: university-(over)educated, inner-city, lefty, suspicious of celebrity and ever-so-faintly nostalgic. If I didn't like The Monthly, who would? Fortunately, there was plenty to appreciate: the arts reviews (and there were lots) were about books, music and exhibitions I was interested in, the long political articles were soothing, and all the contributions were of a high writing standard. But then I succumbed to what Freud calls "the narcissism of minor difference", criticising the magazine's smug tone, occasionally pretentious word choices, and lack of pictures (although there were a few full-page ads - sellouts!). Still, the magazine fits like a glove and reveals like a mirror and I guess I'll be subscribing.

The theme for this week is 5 sentence reviews. This sentence, and the preceding one, don't count for today.

On a sun-drenched Sunday afternoon in Autumn, a procession appeared in Federation Square: 15 hot young Italians and a George Clooneyesque bandleader, jumping up and down and wielding brass. Funk Off, an outfit hailing from a country town in Italy, were a marching band on speed - staccato rhythms, dazzling solos, matching jeans, endearingly awful choreography (square dance!) and more sheer fun than you could poke a stick at. Dreadlocks whipped back and forth as the bass drum player leapt in the air. The tenor saxophonist wore his baseball hat backwards as he pirouetted and moonwalked across the front of the stage. And I thought to myself: this shits all over Cat Empire.

OK, I don't mean that. But I am going to take a week-long break from using the computer, effective ten minutes from now. I'll read emails, but no typing. Call it techno-rebellion, call it mental health, call it monastic discipline or cabin fever, but I won't be calling anything any names until next week.