I am writing the last smelly essay of the year. It’s more than the last ‘smelly’ essay – all essays being smelly – it’s the last essay altogether. Of my undergraduate career! Of course, when I say ‘I am writing’ this essay, I am lying. I’m not writing it right now at all. No, I’m writing this silly blog post in the hope that the essay will somehow be written by itself.

The thesis was handed in on time, miraculously.

What else – I just made a whopping $1.80 on the Melbourne Cup. Two years ago, I made 20c on the cup. Last year, 80c. This shows consistent progress, does it not? Forecasts for 2008 suggest that earnings for the Cup should top $2.20.

Other smelly things: the Federal Election; Deleuze; a tremendously awful season in Australian Idol; the leaked Madonna single (‘The Beat Goes On’ – have you heard it? It includes the lyric, ‘Here comes the rain / To wash away the pain’. Seriously! I don’t think there is a single instance of new lyric material in the whole song. She seems to have written it by putting chopped up portions of every other one of her songs in a big hat and then pulling them out at random to form the new work).

Things that are not smelly: the Justin Timberlake concert tonight; warmer weather; wilful overuse of semi-colons; the prospects of a Tatu film; the prospect of soon being able to read things that were not written by a certain M. Deleuze.