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Five hundred and ninety-two words. That'll do.

Headline today: "Girl Killed By Dingo Cross." I'd be cross too if I'd been killed by a dingo. Boom boom.

With Devics out of the way I've raced though my next review (Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys' Dominos, an excellent cajun album) and come to a thumping halt at the very last line. Dammit, I hate endings.

Endings are evil, evil, evil. I managed to finish the Steve Riley review and now I've got the same problem with Congotronics 2. Everything was easy up to that last paragraph.

M. sent me an SMS to tell me that the Superbowl was being played today. I turned on the TV and there it was: yellow pants vs. dark blue pants. They reached the end of the first quarter and cut to two commentators in the SBS studios, an Aussie and an American. It sounds as if the Australian might have played the game on a U.S. team because the American asked him what he thought about one of the teams changing the colour of their tops "because you've played against them in the past."

"It's pissin me off quite frankly," said the Australian.

M. says we want the blue pants to win.

The wrong colour of pants won, but almost everybody on the screen seemed happy about it so that's probably a good thing.

I've finally killed off that review. One more to go and then I've run out of CDs to write about. Three more should be arriving in the post, but I don't know when they'll get here. One of them will be the latest hot new Malian musician to make a name for himself in the UK. Do we really need another Malian guitarist? I wish world music labels would be more eccentric sometimes.

This morning at about ten, one of the workmen building units up the road started singing along to Phil Collins on the radio.

I didn't think anyone could make Phil Collins worse, but he managed it.

We're not doing too badly with the cleaning at the moment. I vacuumed the floor yesterday (it's wooden, which means that there's nowhere for the dust to hide) and watered the lawn. The house never looks completely clean, but I think that's because we're messy. Not dirty, but messy. Piles of books on the floor, socks on chairs, etc.

The papers say that the gangland war is starting up again after a long hiatus. A senior member of the Carlton Crew has been shot in his very expensive driveway. "Despite talking tough and outlining her agenda to favoured reporters over the weekend, the chief commissioner was nowhere to be seen yesterday as Melbourne was asking why police seem incapable of stopping the bloodshed," says the Australian. Are we asking that? I don't think so. I don't know that anyone thinks the police could be "stopping the bloodshed" at all. It always seems to happen with such impunity that it's more like: oh well, there they go again. Those wacky guys.

Mess has a way of creeping back after it's been banished. Ours does, anyway. My desk is unusable, buried under heaps of paper, and stationary, and a scarf, and an empty box that once held a light bulb, and an Eeyore keychain, and a stuffed puppy, and the packaging for an automatic rice cooker even though we don't own an automatic rice cooker. Funnily enough, the drawers are almost empty. I keep meaning to put things in them but it doesn't happen.

The Rock Paper Scissors label sent me an email this morning, sayig that I could interview a South African singer named Thandiswa if I would have the goodness to be in New York this Friday. "Her English is wonderful," says the email. 'Cause, you know, those popular South African musicians are just notorious for not speaking English.

(But thank you RPS, I appreciate it. Make me the same offer next time she and I are on the same continent and I might say yes.)

I haven't actually sat down and worked it out, but it would probably be a shorter trip if I waited until she was back home in South Africa and flew there to interview her.

God, snow. Here it's still sunny. (Not literally, not right now because it's half past ten at night, but generally. Sunny. I passed the oval by the station on my way to catch the train this morning and a junior boys' cricket club was putting on its hats to shield its collective head against sunstroke and melanoma.)

We had a mouse here a few nights ago. M. put a trap down and the mouse went away. The trap is still sitting on the kitchen floor, unsprung.

I put my hand up to review a Kyrgyz album about a week ago and I've been told that it's going to someone else, which left me crushed for, oh, a while. I reminded myself that there were worse things that could happen. I might have been killed by a mudslide. That would have been awful. A reckless driver ploughed into a group of teenagers near Mildura recently and six of them died. I might have been one of those teenagers. I should just buy the silly album when it comes out.