Office work and mental fatigue are related

The Ghost was busy observing the weekly urban drinking ritual made popular by excitement-challenged corporates - where, come 5pm Friday, suits of varying shapes and sizes scamper out of office buildings all over the city, loosen their top buttons, maybe even take the tie down a notch or two, and try to forget they've got to return to their highrise job in another 72 hours by getting drunk and chatting up their co-workers - when I realised I'd temporarily turned into one. Yes, the dirty Levis had been ditched for pinstripe suit-pants, and the tatty Metallica t-shirt had given way to an ill-fitting Geoffrey Beene number. So what did The Ghost do? Well I went to the bar, grabbed another pint, waded through Jim Schembri's latest masterpiece, titled "That Guy Moment", chuckled quietly at the thought of starting a blog dedicated to championing the professionalism and prose of good- old Jim, and felt a whole lot better about life.

The Ghost only has another week to go in tie land (one down, one to go etc), and once out should have sufficient time and mental inspiration to start posting more regularly, and on topics that actually adhere to the loosely stated modus operandi of this blog: to write on media-related issues, and nothing else. But just to tie anyone over, below is the opening par of the New York Time's review for the Da Vinci Code film (Schembri gave it two stars), which has just been released worldwide:

CANNES, France, May 17 — It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history — "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" — suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.

But The Ghost has only read the first paragraph of the book - which did confirm the Time's assessment of Dan Brown's writing ability - and only seen the trailer for the film, so who am I to judge? Anyway, The Ghost can only agreee and make a empassioned call for more literature, film, music and theatre reviews to include jibes like this - preferably in the first sentence so the reader knows where the reviewer stands. Because, as Peter Parker's dad said in the first Spider Man film: "with great power comes great responsibility". I'm glad to see the New York Times takes its power and its responsibility seriously. We could use some more of the same Down Under, and not just when it comes to The Da Vinci Code.