Tonight is the final night of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for 2007. Last night was the awards night. We were invited to a special invite-only VIP showpony room.

It turned out to be a hot, steamy glass box serving watered down cordial and cheesy rice balls. There's a photo of it here. We're the ones in the fish tank up the top.

We were invited because we were nominated for a Golden Gibbo Award, which we didn't win.

However, the jury is still out on the competition that matters: perhaps we will never know who won the inaugural Melbourne Comedy Festival Cartwheel Competition we held in Trades Hall last Saturday night, because in retrospect it seems there was no independent arbiter. Perhaps we should have noticed this at the time. Should documentary footage ever emerge, however, my money is on Michael Roper, whose technique (honed by years of aerobic dance training at high school) is close to a 9.5 in my professional opinion.

So, what does all this mean? It means the festival is over.

It means we have to go back to our real lives.

It means, in other words, that all we do for the next two weeks is talk about how much fun we had and bask in our retrospective glory.

To make this easier for everyone, here is a snapshot:

Over a thousand people saw our show over three weeks (14 shows).
One of those people was my grade 4/5/6 teacher!
We were reviewed very nicely in The Age, The Groggy Squirrel and The Pun.
Up until now, we had never been reviewed in a public newspaper, ever, by anyone, at any time.
Some of us were misquoted in the press and consequently have updated ASIO files.
Some of us were photographed looking like children with special needs for the local papers.
Our first festival show was nominated for an award.
There were 288 shows in the festival.
My favourite was ours
Because...

These people are now my friends. I choose to get the giggles with these guys.

Will fabulous friends of mine please stop meeting brilliant and gorgeous life partners and staging fantastic, show-stopping, spectacular wedding extravaganzas that run all night and are populated by interesting people who I desire to speak with on a range of matters.

I am trying to write a comedy festival show.

Honestly. Do people even think?

Check this out.

Bloke's found himself in trouble for wearing a political T Shirt on an aeroplane.

Pretty funny when you consider that John Howard is allowed to wear green and yellow parachute tracksuit pants IN THE OPEN AIR.

I know what I think is the bigger magnet for terrorism.

The internet leads you to some interesting places doesn't it?

Tonight I have read an article about Courtney Love in The Scotsman (go here), found several extremely offensive websites while looking for an Australian flag (now there's a good sign) and bumped into this rather delicious nerdalogue of series one through to three of the BBC comedy series Black Books (I didn't know that Manny's character was based on Bob Dylan, but as I've always said: nerds shall inherit the earth). I particularly enjoy the "Chalkboard" section of this entry.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: tank de lord for lady internet.

Now shoosh, I have work to do.

I just heard that hideous noise: the out-of-control screeching of tires and the final sickening thump, followed by car horns and frantic shouting.

I live on a main road, and sometimes I hear the screech and I cringe for the thump but get nothing. Today, it was the most godawful whack. I went outside and there were (why are humans like this?) instantly dozens of people on the scene, frozen in a mixture of confusion and genuine horror.

There was a motorbike on the road, hurled into the traffic, and - after a ghastly couple of seconds - a man scrambling up from it, limping, swearing, lurching around in circles while a terrified bloke in a pink shirt sprinted from his offending vehicle and copped a serve. Whatever else he's feeling now, relief that the bloke was yelling at him rather than dying on the road must be up there in the top three.

Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that I cannot for the life of me remember what I thought was so important about only having the use of one arm for the last six weeks. Given that I, as a driver of a car, could blind-spot a motorcycle and end up in thirty degree heat blowing into a breathalyser and explaining what went wrong to the cops, I'm pretty sure a broken arm and inability to write is a fairly unimportant non-historical event in the scheme of things.

So I hereby retract... actually no I don't, I just acknowledge. I acknowledge that life is fairly random but sometimes not very random. When I was out the front of my house, swearing I would never drive a car again and watching the firemen sweep up the glass, I reached into the letterbox and got the mail. In it, a letter for me congratulating me on my driving record over the last three years and awarding me with a discount on license renewal.

I'm fairly sure that if that entire episode was a short story, the editor's note would be: too obvious.

Anyway, I'm off to renew my license, with a bit of trepidation and a thirty-six dollar discount. The "Arrive Alive Scheme" letter could not have had better dramatic timing.

In other news, anyone wanting to read the gorgeous Anthony Lane on the genuinely bizarre Walt Disney (and I count myself among you) go here.

I'm working in a proper job again. It has come to this.

Yesterday though, was a day for writing. And going for walks. On my lunchtime walk, I wandered past a car garage, with blokes' bodies emerging from under Datsuns and so on.

The difference was, this car garage had no Triple M booming out of it. It had no Golden Hits of The Eighties, either. It had a guy, a real guy, with a moustache, playing a mandolin.

Wandering around, playing a mandolin to the guys with their heads under cars.

I've never wanted to be a mechanic before, but now I kind of like the idea.

It relaxes me that the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens' website has a "FUNGUS OF THE MONTH" section.

Check out this month's fungus! It's from East Gippsland, as are Patties Pies and Rita.

It's late, and my head still feels like it's rolling around in a jar.