...swingers

What is it with 'swinging voters'? Have they no conviction? Have they no loyalty?

Do they change football team mid-season because their team is having a bad run? Because they don't like the current coach? True supporters know that you have to take the bad with the good. Gah!

Someone once said that the people get the government they deserve. I like that saying, and it would seem Australians don't actually deserve a functional government, which is probably about right. The downside is that now the nation will have its decisions made by three cranky farmers and a gay hippy (not that there's anything wrong with being a gay hippy), so congratulations to those who live in their electorates.


Ah, Australia. Disfunctional one day, off the rails the next.

...dickheads

It would seem that government is moving closer to introducing legislation to prevent dickheads from engaging in their dickhead ways in public, or at least from annoying non-dickhead folk with their dickhead behaviour.

This may be a step in the right direction. The rules for the two annual music festivals held at Meredith for childless rock types (no glass, no fires, no dickheads) work surprisingly well. The dickheads are the ones who bring glass and light fires. But in the wider community, the problem lies in identifying who is indeed a dickhead and therefore worthy of prosecution. One hurdle is that the majority of participants in all levels of government (particularly local council) may be affected by these laws, so it is unlikely they will be implemented anytime soon.

But we already have laws for 4-wheel dickheads, aka hoons. People caught for DDD (Dangerous Dickhead Driving) can have their cars or motorbikes impounded for 24 or 48 hours, and can even have their vehicles permanently confiscated on their third offence. But after a few years and thousands of cars confiscated, judging by the regular near death experience that is driving up the Mahoondah Hwy on a Saturday night, I am left with the feeling that the laws just aren't coping. So I'm advocating a return to an old-fashioned approach of policing.

A recently heard a story that many years ago, a young driver was caught doing a big burnout on a public road. Rather than put him in a conga line of dickheads bound for the Magistrates Court, he took him back to the cop shop, gave him a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush and ordered him not to leave the scene of the crime until he had cleaned every last bit of burned rubber of the road.

There were less dickheads around then, which I suspect is largely due to the important fact that a young man would rather have his car confiscated and/or be jailed than clean up after himself.

...when karma runs over your dogma

According to Wikipedia, the World's most accurate source of information (aside from my blog), the second largest religion practised in Australia other than Christianity is Buddhism. I tried to verify this from the website of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, but was bamboozled by my attempt to confirm this seemingly simple statistic without having to download Excel Streaming Beta Data Statistics Viewer Version 8.1. and trawling through 109 years of ye olde spreadsheeting.

Nicolaus Copernicus - inventor of the spreadsheet, and complete bastard

Buddhists represent a whopping 2.1% of the population. Islam comes in a hefty third (1.7%) and Judaism in fourth spot (0.5%). I'm sure 'Jedi' would have given the other minority religions a run for their money, had it not been disregarded by those humourless statisticians at the last census.

So next time you see a report on Today Tonight about the threat to your security by women wearing head scarves, or hear your local One Nation candidate talking about being 'swamped' by Muslim hordes, fear not. If you get a load of Pauline Hanson claiming that the 'Australian way of life' (whatever that is) is under threat by Islam, or hear claims that soon we will all be living under Sharia law, think again. The numbers say it all folks...it's those Buddhists we should fear!

While you could argue that 2.1% is nary a 'swamping', as Australia's fastest growing religion, Bhuddism is set to soon topple society as we know it. People will be forced to eat tofu burgers at incense point. Steak houses will be converted into Lentil as Anythings (sure its virtually free but the service is lousy). And we'll be forced to listen to Nirvana...the one without drums.

And on the world stage, our once quasi-aggressive nation will adopt a conciliatory stance with our traditional foes, and hold a neutral position on global conflicts. You just can't trust neutrals; you never know whose side they are on.

I think we need a war on inner peace before this gets out of hand. Where's George when you need him?

...a public hazard

I was riding my bike down Grattan St. Prahran a few years ago when I saw a couple, completely naked, having sex in the park in broad daylight.

So I did what most guys would do and rode straight into the back of a parked car. They stopped and looked up at me. And I was embarrassed.

Get a room people. What you're doing is dangerous!


Happy Friday!

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...facebook and the holocaust

I've been deliberately steering clear of controversy in this new blog incarnation. There's far too much of it out there anyway, and its overrated. But it's Friday afternoon and I am not in my usual devil-may-care frame of mind for this time of the week. I blame my colleagues.

Firstly, with hindsight I realise that posting the news of my impending fatherhood on Facebook was not a good idea. While we had recently told the 'inner circle', it seems there are many long lost friends and Aunties who are offended that they were not at the top of the notification list. My defence, "Well they're going to find out anyway, and probably not by us because news like this travels fast and it was only a matter of time before someone else mentioned it. And think of all the money we've saved on phone calls. People are now calling us saying WTF?."

The defence is weak, and I have one paw in the doghouse. I blame technology.



Also, on a vastly unrelated note, why do we give Holocaust deniers so much publicity? If someone doesn't believe in the Holocaust they should be allowed to. If someone wants to believe that WW2 never happened, why stop them? If you want to believe in Santa Claus, be my guest. Obsessing and protesting over Holocaust denial is just giving the deniers the publicity they need to sell their books. Just ignore them, and they will disappear.


Happy Bloody Friday!
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...com-pu-pu-pu-pu-etc

"Video games don't kill people, they just kill their minds"
Bart Simpson

I've been playing computer games since my Dad brought home a precursor to modern consoles back in 1981. It was state of the art, and had 4 awesome games in it, controlled by a large red dial/knob thingamy...

Tennis...

Squash...

Wall tennis...

and Soccer...

It was just like the real thing, only less fun. The future looked bright.

I spend most of 1984 seeing this...


I clocked this baby dozens of times.

And soon I was playing this at my friend's houses. We couldn't afford a NES of our own. That or my Mum was a complete tight-arse killjoy.

But despite being born at the right time to soak in computer games from an early age, I was never a fat couch potato kid, ne'er were my peers (I am now though, despite having a Wii). I still spent a considerable amount of time outdoors on my yellow BMX, popping monos and wheelies (but never bunnyhops coz bunnyhops are gay).

And over the years I have destroyed hundreds of Capital Spacecraft and thousands of starfighters. I've shot down dozens of B-52 Flying Fortresses and downed countless AM6 Zeros. I've sunk submarines off Guadalcanal and divebombed Japanese airfields in the Marianas under heavy AA fire.

I've blasted ten thousand aliens (all of them nasty) and dismembered zombies with a chainsaw. I've killed terrorists with shotguns in dawn raids, and I've ran over dozens of pedestrians (accidentally).

I've done such things as ripped people's heads off with the spinal cord still attached, I've knifed people in the guts and sprayed their blood all over the room . Well I had to, or else they would have killed me!

And aside from the blogging, I've turned out perfectly normal. By that I mean I haven't actually killed anyone for real. I've never even hit someone, aside from my big sister but she deserved it because she kicked me square in the balls because she "just wanted to see what would happen". I'm even a bit of a vegetarian. I eat fish.... and duck. Well a duck is basically a fish isn't it because it spends most of its life on water. So I eat any animal that lives on or near a water body. I even give money to MSF to stitch up the poor people wounded in war zones.

So why do some people insist that computer games are the root of violence and obesity in our society? Stupidity is the root of violence and obesity in our society, and stupidity is born of low education and a lack of moral guidance. Despite what some people believe, I can tell the difference between an armless green-toothed zombie on a TV screen and a fellow pedestrian as I walk to the shops, aned therefore not have the urge to shoot them. Anyone who can't hopefully received urgent medical attention at a young age.

In the 1960's a guy in the USA went to see Disneys Snow White at the cinema. After that he came home and stabbed his mother 100 times because he belived her to be the wicked witch. Perhaps she was, but my point is that based on the anti-games people argument, we should ban that film because it incited violence. Lets not blame a sick mind, it's far easier to blame the movie/computer game/heavymetal song lyrics.

If computer games did affect the kids so profoundly, then my generation, who played a lot of Pacman, would spend much of their time in darkened rooms, popping pills and listening to repetitive music.

Heaven forbid!

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...f*c*book

I'm not a Facebook junkie but I do see it's appeal. It seems less cold than sending emails and you can keep an eye on your friends' activities, if they are also into Facebook.... assuming that you actually give a toss about them.

I do use it a few times a week however and I'm starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable in my own skin, aside from the fact that in the Legal Terms & Conditions that everyone agrees to without reading when they sign up says that apparently I and all my friends and personal information are now the property of Facebook and that the only recourse I have involves spending 'Damnation in Hades' and something about filling my mouth in with cement.

I'm relatively fine with that. What I'm not sure about is my ex girlfriend now wanting to be my friend after dumping me seven years ago, (but she's a family friend, so I guess some degree of contact in inevitable). Or weirdo, long-lost relations inlaw wanting a cut of the 'action'. I haven't even met some of these people and from what I've heard, I don't want to! Or friends of the family that you don't particularly like. Just because I've had lunch with you at Aunty Beryl's house doesn't automatically mean I want to be your friend. Or my police officer inlaw, when me and my friends come from a strictly non-policeperson background. I don't want my police officer inlaw snooping around me and my friends' shenanigans, not that we actually do 'shenanigans' anymore, but I'd like to keep the door open.

What should I do?

Should I...

a) remove all of my personal information, photos, status, etc, change my name to Enigmah (with a silent "h" to make it more enigmatic), have extensive plastic surgery, move to the mountains of Ecuador, live with a group of exiled guachos and visit Facebook once a year for the purpose of 'keeping up appearances'?

b) go and see a psychotherapist about my acute paranoia?

c) not worry about it? Befriend everyone except convicted mass murderers and then completely ignore them?

d) not get romantically involved with friends of the family ever again?

.

...can you hear the plunder?

Have you heard this story, the one that Men at Work ripped off Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree when they wrote Downunder?

Now I'm no musical virtuoso, but those songs don't sound a bleedin' thing like each other. One is an early 80's pop/reggae smash from an obscure band from St.Kilda and now favourite of drunken, embarassing fellow Australian backpackers world-wide. The other is a campfire round written by Girl Guides (I mean no disrespect to the International Girl Guide Association, in fact I have a ton of respect. Keep baking little sisters!!*)

Apparently it has something to do with the flute bit, but I still can't hear it. I didn't even know that Kookaburra has a bloody flute in it. I also forgot how funny that Men at Work filmclip is.




Because the best way of finding out the ultimate truth about everything is handing it over to a bunch of bloggers, what say you, o' learned ones.


*I also realise that the Girl Guides Association does not continue to propagate the stereotypical role of women and girls acting primarily in the role of unpaid domestic worker. Nowadays, according their their webpage, they fight AIDS and save the enviromnment, along with making a mean chocolate crackle. Most girls join the Scouts anyway. Baden Powell would be rolling in his grave.

...conundrum

So one of my colleagues that sits next to me eats peanut butter toast everyday for morning tea. He eats it at his desk and the smell is very overpowering and lingers for ages. Its weird because I like eating peanut butter toast, but I don't like smelling it, unless I'm about to eat it too. Only trouble is that I'm on a diet, and peanut butter toast is one of the things I need to avoid snacking on daily, so its kind of like a tease.

Despite being a generally nice guy, I think he is being bit inconsiderate. Or am I just being a bit precious? Should I say something, or should I just let it slide?

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...supermarket rant

I hate supermarkets. I always try to be in and out of them in 10 or so minutes, list in hand, bristling with optimism and impatience. However my plans for an efficient trip with a quick getaway are inevitably thwarted. Can anybody like a supermarket? How can you like a place where when you rock up and have to park miles away because noone can see lines on asphalt these days and leave three-quarter parking spaces everywhere? And then you go and get a broken shopping trolley with 3 wheels facing in opposite directions and when you push it the opposing forces threaten to blow it apart showering the carpark with twisted metal. And you have to dig up a gold coin for the pleasure and you soon realise an error in your planning as you rifle through your console looking under the multitude of silver coins and naturally fail to locate one that will work. So you have to enter the dreaded store prematurely and you wait with every leathery-skinned smoker in the suburb at the 'Customer Service' counter and after reading the entire day's Herald-Sun, including the 28-page formguide eleven times even though you remain strongly opposed to gambling and the whipping of large, dumb, animals with midgets strapped to their backs, you trade in your 20c pieces for a rusty old dollar so you can earn the right to re-enter the store and give them hundreds of your hard earned dollars and then afterwards return your trolley neatly to the trolley parking area so management don't have to pay some poor teenage refugee $7.25 per hour to round the bastards up.

So you enter, trolley groaning with pent up energy of unimaginable proportions, already half an hour past your planned time of departure after dodging the old codgers in Volvos and young powermums driving large, shiny, urban assault vehicles filled with 7-year old private school kids that are already smarter than you, busy finding cures for cancer and surfing Facebook on their iPhones as balding middleage men in Audi convertibles pop in on their way home to buy some flowers and a box of choccys for the missus to ease the guilt of spending the last two hours 'overtime' shagging the 23 year old admin lady as you run the gauntlet that is the carpark.

And your entry is inevitably thwarted by some confused person at the swinging-gate-thingy who is displaying all the symptoms of someone who has never actually been in public before, which could be quite interesting but you have no patience today as you make a break for the least congested direction. And you find yourself looking for that obscure ingredient that could be in this aisle, or that aisle, or possibly that aisle, depending on if the floor manager feels an egg is a "Cooking Need" or a "Fresh Produce" so you walk a distance equivalent to halfway to the moon and back until your feet get blisters and your knees buckle and it hurts to piss and you see a tall, young man who's badge thankfully proclaims him to be a "Fresh Food Person" and he tries not to make eye contact with you as he strides down the aisle pretending he has just been telepathically summoned by the manager to do something really important so you bail him up and demand to know where the fuck the eggs are hiding even though you've already walked past them 17 times and he says "Try Aisle 3", not because the eggs are in Aisle 3 but because he was getting scared from seeing a large blood vessel pulsating up your face past your red, twitching eyeball and just said anything to make you go away.

So you decide to go try the deli again to get a frozen piece of "fresh" fish but as you approach two dozen stocky, old Italian women armed with half-price ciabata loaves jump out from behind a pyramid of overpriced coliban potatoes big enough to be Tutankhamen's Ocean Grove weekender and each grab a little deli-ticket-thingy just before you do. So you diveroll away to find solace by the yoghurt fridge, but soon find yourself muscled out by power-shopping, lycra clad yuppies with ponytails trying to decide if they should grab the no-fat yoghurt or be really outrageous and let themselves go this week by purchasing the 99.99% fat-free, and you hate them for being so healthy and attractive as you lurch off down the aisle with the batteries and rat poison and clothespegs because noone is ever there, but you soon realise that noone is there because some homemaker with a 1-yar old has dropped a toe-curling fart with an aroma not unlike a broken jar of egg mayonnaise so you hold back the puke and nearly slip on a broken jar of mayonnaise as you sprint back to the deli with your screeching trolley which is now glowing red-hot and showering sparks and take ticket #36 as they call out "Number 37!" And you wait there for 3 weeks before asking the spotty, squeaky-voiced teen for some fetta until you realise they don't actually have any real fetta except for the one that is $1,579.99 per kilo so you buy the C-grade imitation Australian 'fetta' from Wonthaggi and a frozen fish stick labelled "Whiting" that is sitting in a puddle of translucent slime next to the mysterious "Ovenable Fish" and trudge off to pick up a bag of wet, unwashed lettuce wrapped in heavy plastic for $3.99 even though you know you'll throw half of it out because it only lasts 24hrs and you only need a dozen leaves but you have no other choice because you can't buy the stuff loose anymore. And all the while the background music switches between George Michael, Celine Dion, and some incredibly irritating song trying to convince me how passionate the kids working there are about 'fresh food' until you start to succumb to the brainwashing and feel happy that you aren't getting your gear from stale food people because apparently you can't get fresh food anywhere else in the fucking country as some boofhead bumps your vibrating, near-fission, glowing trolley and out flies the congealed fishstick and lands in a sticky patch next to the milk fridge that has turned black with the grimey footsteps of a thousand jokers.

Then you arrive at the checkout as the lady in the front of the queue looks up at you, startled and says "Woops! Won't be a min!" as she runs off and returns 1 hour later with an armful of chocoloate blocks, glossy magazines and some essential NibblyBitz for her ugly cat and then decides to pay the $48.73 bill in 5 and 10 cent pieces but realises at the end she is 15 cents short and the checkout kid dearly wants to say "Don't worry about it. It's only 15 cents" but she can't or else she'll be dragged off by a squad of men in black pyjamas from a secret doorway so the customer pulls out the EFTPOS card but enters the wrong pin number three times and you look at the other 2 open lanes and think if I had have lined up over there instead there I'd be home by now, I'd have had dinner and a bath by now, hell it'd be the bloody weekend by now, even if I'd gone through the 12 items or less aisle 4.3 times. And every time you make eye contact with the customer service manager she looks at the floor then runs away and hides in the back room and when it's your turn you step out of the large pile of dead skin cells accumulating at your feet and nearly trip over your long, grey beard and some smartarse comes up behind you and says "I've only got two things mate. Can I go ahead?" and you reluctantly say "Yes" because if you didn't you'd feel like a prick and generally try to avoid tension but you feel like a prick anyway for letting yourself be pushed around by tossers who think their time is more important than yours and when it's finally your turn you realise that you forgot to bring those green envirobags and you feel like the world's biggest enviro-vandal as the trainee-checkout kid puts 30 items into 52 plastic bags in 96 minutes, including that little blue bag that cleaning products seem to have to go in and you wonder "Isn't bogroll perfectly hygenic until you wipe your arse with it?" So you pay the $893.82 bill, walk the 121 kilometres to your car then make the return journey so you can get your bloody $2 back on the flaming, smoking, red-hot trolley that is behaving more and more like a doomsday device, a dangerous weapon of mass consumption.



Then you get home and realise you forgot the bloody bread!

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...australia...you're standing in it!

So fifty large Sperm whales die overnight on the west coast of Tasmania. Rather than sit around going "Ooh that's awful", "What a shame", "Ought not happen" and "'Tis a real tragedy indeed. Who can we blame?", why don't we chop them up and give the meat to the Japanese in exchange for them ceasing whaling in the Southern Ocean? There is more useful meat on those 50 whales than in the entire annual Japanese catch of small Minke whales.

And why not make a deal to give them the dozens of large and rare whales that get struck by ships or tangle and drown in the thousands of nets and craypots lines around the Australian coast every year, the "collateral damage" from our appetite for seafood and money. The whales we kill, the dead whales the Australian media rarely mentions, (unless the fisherman actually report it (why would they?) and there is some chance of survival and thus a happy ending). Why criticise ourselves? It's much more fun to criticise the bloody Japs (yeah that's right...we still remember the war)!


Anyhow, the whales we kill are not being deliberately targeted, so it's apparently all OK, kosher, hunky dory, not-our-fault-so-let's-not-think-about-it. Less than 3% of whale deaths from entanglement are actually reported, so the true Australian whale death-toll is not known, but it is likely to be in the hundreds per year. It's out of sight and therefore out of mind.

Wake up Australia! Let's clean up our own backyard before lobbing hand-grenades of self-righteousness at other cultures. The solution... we're standing in it! Lets give the Japanese a taste of our Aussie Sperm (whales) to stop them from playing with pointed sticks in our southern regions (I'm deeply sorry about that one but I simply couldn't resist).


And the mining boom is over. Well roll me in flour and bake me for forty minutes, who would have ever thought that would ever happen!!!

To all those people whingeing about the imminent job losses and the recently bustling towns that will now be largely abandoned, it's not called a 'boom' for nothing. Things that go 'boom' do not go 'booming' in perpetuity. This exact thing has been happening across Australia for 200 years. The country is littered with ghost towns, remnants of more prosperous times.

Why is it that the workers and their unions somehow think we should be somehow immune to the patterns of history and the fundamentals of our economic system that is tied up in a model of 'reliance' on unsustainable levels of growth through rampant capitalism. About time we seriously looked at the 'steady-state' economic model. If the human race is to have a future, this is where it will lie.


Woo, I think I need a cuppa and a lie down after all that. Next one will be a happy rant. Promise.