I don’t know much about cooking. I mean I can tear open a packet of mi goreng with an unnecessary amount of ceremony and knife work. And I’ve no doubt that should Matt Moran ever sample one of my cups of cold Milo, he’d hold it up triumphantly, praising my delicate balance of flavors and my bold decision to partially dissolve the powder in boiling water before adding milk. What a risk taker. And yet despite these michelin worthy skills, I’m not above sampling the culinary attempts of others. So when it came time for a mineral water family dinner last week, Chin Chin was the proposed locale and after being assured (lied to) that they would probably have instant Indonesian noodles on their Vietnamese menu, I was happy to go along and no doubt engage in some seriously heated debate with the chefs about degrees of package tear, the best ratio of red to black sauce and how long a person can realistically exist on a diet of noodles and milk before a colonial case of scurvy sets in.

Now now, I know what you’re thinking: Chin Chin is the new cool kid on campus and we, well, we are halfway through our biannual Golden Girls marathon. Still, with season 4 episode 3 on pause (Blanche and the girls are off on a Caribbean holiday - never gets old) we were out on the town and looking more Goldfinger than Golden Girl. This was not to last. If you’ve spent the better part of an afternoon eating Wagon Wheels and eagerly watching the romantic escapades of four 65 year old women unfold, there’s really no coming back from that. And besides, once you’ve decided you look like James Bond, making a pretend gun with your hands and humming the theme tune while you dart around corners and shoot at bad guys is pretty much unavoidable. Two minutes in the door and we’d just managed to blow the non-existent bullet dust off our imaginary guns and put them back into their make-believe holsters when we spotted our water in a bar fridge…

It’s not often you get confused about whether you’re inside or outside. I mean it used to happen to me all the time but we eliminated the problem by not building windows into our new office - a good rule of thumb: can’t see the outside = inside or night time or playing a wicked awesome game of murder in the dark. But it happened again on Tuesday night at The Forum which is weird because they were using the ol’ no windows trick themselves and I’d been sure to cancel my standing Tuesday night murder in the dark game (my MITD buddies were not happy to be losing their best ringer, especially since we were up against league favorites Zombreed and they’re having a killer season. Still, as I explained to Leron while we were playing each other in World Of Warcraft last night, I’m all about the arts). Of course, The Forum gang are their own worst enemies because they’ve gone and lit their blue ceiling up like the Roman sky at dusk. It’s enough to confuse the most discerning of inside/outsidies! So we walked in for the program launch of the Melbourne Festival confused about the time of day, arguing about who’d win in a fight between Russell Crowe and Kevin Sorbo, and concerned that our MITD team weren’t going to utilise the new plays we’d been strategising all week.

Luckily, anyone who knows us knows we’re not fussy. Stick a mineral water in our hands and we’ll happily listen to any band if they play Serbian acoustic-trance music from the post-independence Bulgarian border that was written between March 2007 and February 2008. And we’ll pretty much just veg out in front of the TV and watch whatever. As long as it’s Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. So you can imagine we’re a receptive audience to anyone announcing a festival program. Provided Riverdance and The Dixie Chicks are on the bill, what’s not to love?

But apparently Michael Flatley left Riverdance like ten years ago and The Dixie Chicks are busy or not very good or something. Anyway, the Melbourne Festival has managed to come up with a program that doesn’t rely on recalcitrant arms or uninspiring country music circa 1999 to get our attention. Ever wondered what Shakespeare would be like if a Great Dane was cast as Hamlet? Me too! And have you ever watched a play and wished that when you screamed for the brooding male lead to “just kiss her already!” they would do it instead of having you escorted out of the theatre by an attractive but frankly curt security guard? Samesies!! And have you always dreamed of having a baby with the tail of a devil and the wings of an angel and the height of Godzilla and a head so shiny you can see yourself in it?? Oh… yeah, me either.

Still, all of our wildest dreams are coming true this October! Don’t be jealous because we got to find out before you did. Be jealous because we got to find out at an awesome launch party being all cool and artsy, casually slipping words like “uber” and “neo” and “iconoclast” into all of our sentences. But jealousies and indecipherable nonsense sentences aside, if you’re into traditional Rajasthani music performed in red-light district windows, or maybe thumb pianos playing psychedelic folk pop are more your thing, get yourself tickets to some or most or all of the festival!!

And if you’re after tickets to the highly anticipated finals season of the third annual Central Highland’s Murder In The Dark tournament, get in early because seats are limited and it’s after dinner in Leron’s mum’s backyard every Tuesday this September.