Snakes and Manners

I love nature; really I do.  It's all natural and stuff and the absolute best thing about venturing into nature is that it is largely devoid of annoying humanoids, probably the same ones who insist on using supermarkets and highways the same freakin' time as I do.  But as much as I love being in nature's aura, I refuse to spend the night with it, because that's what houses are for.

I write of nature because today I saw my seventh hissy snake of the 2012-13 snakey season.  I regularly walk up a mountain - think Everest, and then decrease the enormity just a fraction - so I am accustomed to a world of creepy, Jurassic Park-type creatures and their crazy, creepy ways.  I wonder if there are any type of snake or lizard that all the other snakes and lizards find weird and creepy?  Only us humans, probably.

Me and snakes get along just tickety boo.  When I say tickety boo, I mean we tolerate each other. Like most marriages. Like ebony and ivory, we live togther in perfect harmony. Until we don't.  In actual fact snakes are shit scared of me and I must admit that my heart rate goes through the roof when we encounter each other.  I'm not scared of them as such, but I would be okay if they didn't always throw me a surprise party whenever I showed up on their mountain. That's all. 

It's not like I don't plan ahead and practice good mountain etiquette.  A few years ago I decided that I would warn my snake buddies of my arrival on the mountain by basically stomping along as I walked up the mountain.  It's just good manners.  They are supposed to feel the vibrations and stay the fuck away from me.  These were the rules.  They were good rules.  Everyone knew the rules.  But apparently a new family of snakes have moved into the neighbourhood and don't know about the body corporate. 

Why are there so many snakes? I think they need to implement a one child policy in the reptilian world. Why the hell would anyone want 40 children anyway?  It's not like they get a baby bonus.  Or do they?

That is all. Good day.

When Christmas and Zombies Attack

It's that wonderfully special time of the year, where everyone you meet is tired and crankypants and just wants to go home and not play with anyone anymore ever.  That's Christmas; the most magical time of the year.  Every year I forget that the year before I swore to myself that I should not work the week before Christmas because it totally, totally sucks, but here I am, yet again.

It's completely draining.  I'm pretty sure I had a microsleep on the way up in the elevator this morning somewhere between floors six and ten, and every hour of the day feels like a lifetime.  It's like being forced to watch a whole season of Keeping Up With the Carcrashians in a day, except no-one wears baggy leather slut pants and, according to my corporate directory, there are no men called Kanye in the house, yo.  Although sometimes my life feels like a reality trash carcrash.

Shopping centres are also hardcore at this time of the year, but imagine how Santa feels?  The man's gotta be a sadist, willingly inviting all those little terrorists to sit on his lap all day.  Who does that? Fortunately for us suckers enduring this last working week before Christmas, it'll all be over by Friday, when the day of reckoning is upon us and the zombie alpacas will come and suck our brains out.  I can't imagine that anyone will be able to tell the difference, to be honest.

You Only Live Twice

I've been posting about the big J-Bondo a bit recently.  I'm not obsessed.  I'M NOT.  Although I have recently watched all of the Sean Connery era flicks again, because someone has lent them to me and they are not going to just watch themselves.

You Only Live Twice is one of the stupidest book/movie titles, because I’m pretty sure only about 60% of people get to live twice.  Although stupid titles are always a useful and credible red flag that indicates the ensuing book/movie is going to be shite as well, and this one is no exception.

But it's James Bond and it's Ian Fleming and it's... James Bond, so you just have to cut them some slack and play the hand you're dealt.  There are one thousand and fifty two things I thought were outright ridunkulous in this movie, and here are a few:

All the personnel on the rocket launching pad that was located in the inactive volcano were colour coordinated. Cute.  Speaking of teletubbies, Bond's Japanese ninja friends were all dressed in fifty shades of volcano crater grey, for obvious reasons, and came complete with bonus suction pads.  And it worked a treat, until it didn't, and they all died.  But they did blow a massive crater in the massive crater.

There are a lot of opportunities in life where you can wing it, but I'm pretty sure driving a space rocket is not one of them, James Bond.

The Japanese Bond girl gets about in a white bra and knickers for the majority of the flick but is suddenly and gratiously afforded a (buttonless) shirt by the wardrobe department when all hell breaks loose.  But she still doesn't have any pants.  I don't understand why they can never organise a budget for clothes for the Bond girl.

Later, in the crater, she loses her shirt that she spent all movie working towards, so she's back to her bra and knickers. No clothesure for her then. Bond movies should do a deal with Bonds undies.

At least Sean Connery relinquished his beloved baby blue terrytowelling shorts jumpsuit he so loved wearing in EVERY FILM for this particular movie.  And thank goodness the white boyleg shorts that he wore for nighttime deepsea scuba diving reconnaissance in Thunderball didn't make an appearance.  They were great camouflage under the flourescent light of the moon, and indeed their genius was magnified when combined with an orange leotard.  Yes, an orange leotard.

Thunderball is the movie where the fighter jet doubles as a submarine.  The Australia Defence Forces need to dump the Joint Strike Fighter program and focus on the acquisition of flying submarines.

In You Only Live Twice, Bond's crazy arse bad boy nemesis - who is relentlessly mocked in the Austin Powers flicks - has a nice and cosy base-of-a-volcanic-crater loungeroom made of slate, old lava and traditional volcanic floating floorboards, along with an artfully decorated pond full of piranha.  Like a boss.

Alas, the makers of Austin Powers didn’t really have to dig that deep.

FauxTan - Beyond the Pale

Despite what Nicole Kidman says, pale skin is horrible. Although Kidman was married to renowned professional nutjob Tom Cruise for over a decade, so how good can her judgment be anyway?  While I don't generally look to movie star actresses for my health and safety bulletins, Kidman is a great, unintentional role model for the skin cancer cause.

One is not amused by pale skin, the type of which one was distressingly born with. If my lineage had the indecency to thrust pale skin upon me, it could at least have gone full circle and provided it with a translucency that rivalled Nic's.  On the plus side, at night I don't glow like a cheap and tacky christmas tree angel with a fur tree pole stuck up my arse.

Having said that, I’m all for avoiding the sun at all costs (my life is full of inconsistencies. I just roll with it). Despite its life-giving properties, the sun really is a massive pain-in-the-arse, with its key attributes falling more into column A (bad) than column B (good) when it comes to human contact.

The incidence of skin cancer stats freak me out a little bit, so I try not to think about it other than always slipping, slopping and slapping before, during and after sun exposure. It really is a burden but, hey, I don’t want to die from sun. Apparently two in three Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer by the time they are 70, so that’s just great.

The person who brain-washed women into believing a particular hue of tanned skin is more pleasant than white skin should be slapped hard in the face.  My desire for tanned, brown skin and my terror of sunbaking do not really correlate.

To get around this, for years I have invested in a good fake tan product that I apply myself.  I have never really been that bothered over the years applying this fake tan, but I’ve recently bought a new product – Johnson & Johnson’s Holiday Skin Body Lotion - that alleges to blend a moisturiser with a fake tan, that “gradually builds a beautiful, light tan”, which is proving to be a complete annoyance.

Of course I was sucked in by this nonsense, and I'm sure it works a treat, but here’s my beef. This product says it provides “24 hour moisturisation”, but also says to “avoid contact with clothes and other items until the lotion is fully absorbed”. So if it takes 24 hours to “fully absorb”, when am I supposed to sleep? It would be helpful if the big cheese of this multinational had used the product before marketing it to millions of women who now only get to sleep in winter.

Her Majesty's Secret Cashcow

*SPOILERS, SUCKERS*

Today I watched the latest instalment in the Bond franchise juggernaut.  It's called Skyfall and it's the 230th movie in the James Bond series.  Or maybe it's the 23rd, who can keep up with it all.  Bloody good flick though; back to the traditional Bond style.  And in traditional action genre style, the storyline goes a little something like this - protagonist and antagonist spend 128 minutes trying to kill each other.

While Bond creator Ian Fleming passed on in the 1960's, and other writers have continued his legacy, I think it's safe to say that during his years working for the British Government, while his fellow civil servants pretended to be engaged in superspy subterfuge while they were really just filing boring, unclassified pieces of paper and writing dull emails in that old-fashioned pen, paper and envelope retro style, Fleming's imagination was going apeshit. 

I for one am glad that he was so bored and uninspired working in an office job in the public sector, Gov'ner.  Never mind the bollocks, eh wot!  Y'allreet?  Wass goin' on?  Sorry, got distracted by British slang that no Brit says ever unless they work for Eastenders.  Circling back to topic right now, innit.

A few things I noted in Skyfall:

Everyone knows that the best special super-effect for dark movies is real-life, non-CGI dark gloomy weather, ideally so dark that the audience need to don night vision goggles to know what the heck is going on.

The inherent risk of missing one Oscar encouragement award-worthy raised eyebrow or a half-smile is that you may lose track of the entire storyline.  Although with a Bond movie it's safe to assume that if there is gunfire or mortars, someone just died, and if there is no gunfire or mortars, someone is about to die.

So, weather-wise, I was a little surprised that much of the movie was filmed in a country renowned for its fun, sunny, balmy climate.  England.  It must have been boring for the film crew to have to wait around on set until it rained in London.  Shit weather is such a rare event in England that the director must have been tearing his hair out with the stress of it all.

In actual fact, the chance of it raining in London on any given day of the whole year is literally so excellent that one would put many quids, pounds, shillings or euros on it.  Probably not euros; nobody understands euros.  That's just how London rolls, innit. 

While London's weather may be complete bollocks at the best of times, the film crew were again just really lucky with the overcast gloominess and general malaise that greeted them when the film set relocated to the cheery Scottish moors.  Casting Scotland as 007's weather antagonist is certainly not going to win any friends at the Scottish Tourism Board, what with that country's fine track record of endless, sun-drenched summer days.

For me, the movie's best kept secret was the addition of Ralph Fiennes right at the end as the new M!  As much as I loved Dame Judi in that role, I approve of his casting because I heart Lord Voldermort. I suppose now the Harry Potter cashcow has dried up Fiennes had to find a new franchise teat to milk.  It makes sense for actors to sign up to multi-million dollar movie franchises. 

It's just like the good ol' golden days of Hollywood, when actors were signed to movie studios and were therefore unable to say no when the studio said you were going to be in a movie where you were required to wear an outfit made of panels of tin sheets for months and months and your co-stars, a dog actor called Terry (stage name Toto) and a pair of red sparkly shoes became far more famous than you'll ever be. 

But Fiennes is no fool.  He has worn a prosthetic non-nose in Harry Potter, a bandaged face in The English Patient, a Tom Cruise mask to play Maverick in Top Gun, and who can forget his body of work aboard a Qantas flight in 2007.  Through those roles, Fiennes avoided becoming typecast as anything more than the guy who likes wearing rubber.

Bond goes Gaza

There's heaps of angry bird stuff going on in the world at the moment. For example, the Middle Earth terrorists are blowing up shit again, but it's going to be a-okay because Daniel Craig has got his Bond on and has negotiated a ceasefire, which will last for approximately two days. 

The mainstream media is reporting that the psychotically-challenged serial killers, Hamas, the charming Muslim Brotherhood outfit who control the Gaza Crispy Strip©, have agreed to stop bombing the crap out of poor old Israel because of a deal struck by Hillary(ous) Clinton, but we all know that 007 had something to do with it.  Have you not seen his movies, CNN?  You don't mess with Bond.

I haven't seen the new flick yet but I'm gonna guess that Bond, James Bond gets accosted by an angry pod of terrorists, the boss of which has been facially deformed by having his head shoved into a Magic Bullet blender, the Personal, Versatile Countertop Magician.  Or maybe he accidently watched the Magic Bullet infomercial on late night television and voluntarily stuck his face into the speeding chopping blades.

The terrorists, just for a new innovative script twist, want to annihilate Bond and his multi-million gazillion dollar, dirty, capitalist movie franchise and arrogantly possess the lofty goal of wanting to destroy the whole entire world, one Aston Martin at a time.  Then bang, bang, boom, boom, ouch, ahhh, blood, gross, baddies die or flee to an Adam Sandler movie. 

Then Bond gets all Petraeus-esque sidetracked by a non-English speaking, psychotic, nuclear scientist supermodel, nearly dies, and then sails into the distance on a yacht with a different bikini-clad femme fatale whorebag, because, after 25 or so films, the scriptwriters have never been able to come up with a new closing scene befitting a superspy.

The Twinkie is Sinky

The company that makes Twinkies, the sugary snack that Americans love for reasons I cannot fathom, is going bust.  And, surprise, surprise, it is the fault of a workers' union, after striking workers failed to hit a deadline to go back to work at the advice of their union, and now 18,000 people don't have a job.  A union that costs workers their jobs isn't much of a union.  Which part of the word "union" do unions not understand?

The post-Twinkie world is, unsurprisingly, causing great distress to many folk in the United States because they just don't have that many options of sickly, sugary crap to stuff their faces with.  People in Australia don't really care about Twinkies or their demise.  But I do know what Twinkies are, having been exposed to their mass marketing techniques when I was but a child, and I was just as grossed out by them then as I am now.

My familiarity with Twinkies comes from observing Jughead Jones and Aunt Hilda as they gorged themselves stupid on creamy, sponge cake goo on the advertisement pages of my Archie Comics in the 1980s.  I never felt a need to go anywhere near a Twinkie after that.  And the comic also tried to flog sea monkeys through some ponzi scheme, where you could weirdly purchase a middle-class family of midget crustaceans.  Totally freaked me out.  They still try and sell those things.

While we are on topic, let me tell you what really gets my goat.  American bread.  They put sugar in normal, average, garden variety bread in the United States!  Bread is not supposed to taste like a Twinkie.  It's so distasteful that on my recent sojourn to Florida I was forced to spit that shit out (such a way with words today).  No wonder the United States has a collective weight problem.

I admit that America is an ongoing, moving target of my cynicism and negativity, but, what can I say, it's an easy target.  If questioned I will use the 'Twinkie Defense (sic)", a compelling argument made by a U.S. man who blamed the sugar in Twinkies for giving him depression which caused him to murder someone.  Like I said; easy target.

Lawn Bowls



The best part about meeting British HRHness is telling
constitutional republicans about it and watching their heads
spin around and then explode in a fit of rage.  Heh.



Stupid Clock Face

I was at the gym the other day and something happened that left me completely dejected, as opposed to the usual depression slash melancholy of having to watch 20-year-old girls getting more lithe and more fitter than anyone needs to be. 

Note to self: you are probably at the age when it is probably best to not compare your body shape with 20-year-olds.  But, hey, I'm a chick and that's what we do, to our detriment of course.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah, that wasn't the main source of my deflation.  I was finishing up stretching and I leant on the wall and came face to face with a ticking timebomb.  Well it was a ticking clock, but it was one of those ticking clocks with moving hands that provide an annoying continuous sweep for the minute hand rather than the much slower and less stressful tick, tick, tick.

There's nothing like a minute hand flying at a breakneck pace to let you know that time is running out.  Just, you know, in general.  Now these clocks have me completely psyched out, as if I'll look over and they'll have unexpectedly bent the space time continuum and I'll be trapped in a timewarp circa June 2028.  I hope they don't wear 80's fashion in 2028.  It sucked the first time around.

That out of control minute hand caused me some fleeting widespread panic and alarm, and then I went home.

I know; blog post fail.  It really is quite mind-boggling the things I find worthy of words in blog posts.

The Luckiest Fly in the World

Cocobean may just be the luckiest little fly in the world.  What? Oh, you want some context?  Well maybe just maybe I don't want to give you any.  The End.  Oh, fine then. 

Do you remember that titillating scene of Karate Kid where Mr Miagi pretended to be able to catch a fly with a set of dull chopcticks while meditating?  Well I did that yesterday, except I wasn't meditating and I didn't have any chopsticks, but I did catch Cocobean with a Spider Catcher Unit Thingy.

Cocobean was my pet fly, for about 10 minutes, before I managed to catch him and set him free.  What I realised is that trying to catch a fly for ten minutes will drive you completely mad.  I don't know why I was trying to achieve by catching a fly.  I guess we'll never know. 

It might be due to my inability to kill shit. It's really hard for me, because I know that all the bugs that freak me out - like spiders, cockroaches and the like - have families that want to see them at Christmas time, or for Thanksgiving if they are visiting from America.

Anyway, it's hard work.  Fly-catching.  Your head starts to spin on its axis with all that bloody buzzing and your eyes start squirting blood and you start yelling and cursing at nothing but thin air as it whooshes past your ears.  Had it been filmed I would definitely have been looking at some serious padded cell time.  Why are flies so damn chaotic in their flight patterns?  There is just no thought given to navigation, moving obstacles in the sky or walls.

Cocobean is free now.  Fly, Cocobean, fly.  Fly away and piss off the neighbours who are trying to cook sausages on their barbecue.

Excellent.  Another pointless blog post to add to my collection.

Horses and Bayonets

I find it mind-boggling how many people get their political analysis from CNN without ever actually viewing the footage or reading any of the transcripts on whatever this media outlet’s incomparably inept journalists comment on. I don't take anyone's opinion on politics at face value, especially views that are held by CNN correspondents.

The reporters at CNN might pretend to meticulously scrutinise the presidential debate, and make shrewd, snippy notes of their observations, but then they sit on their glittery soundstage and deliberate for hours and hours and hours about the most inane drivel and discuss, at great length, just how stupendously amazing and sparkly the democratic candidate was, regardless of how that candidate performed.

This is called left wing bias and most of the media are guilty as charged. Spin it until it fits their narrative, which is to keep democrats in power in the White House.  No-one knows why the majority of the mainstream media are left wing.  It's all just a big mystery.

They want Barack Obama to stay in the top job, and they want Mitt Romney to go far, far away, and take his pesky logic, common sense and economic credentials with him. How the hell is a bungling incumbent president supposed to maintain the top gig if there is someone who is actually qualified for the job challenging him?

CNN are always, always, always on the Democrat's side, and they spend the rest of their time demonising Republicans.  This doesn’t change.  Ever.  They don't do balance.  There is no neutrality and there never will be.  If you are neutral at CNN you will be fired by the network by the end of the day.

But who cares, you say.  Well it matters, because there are a lot of people out there who only tune into  this stupid media outlet during election time and don't appreciate how the media influence the public agenda. And let's be clear; CNN tell you what to think. So don't let them hoodwink you; read the transcript and watch the debate for yourself.  Think for yourself.  CNN have an agenda and they want you to buy into it and vote appropriately.

And despite endless harping on about wanting the truth from their presidential candidates, many of the electorate really don't care that much about fact checking, and just take Obama’s side for reasons I cannot fathom.

Exhibit A. During the last Presidential Debate, incumbent Barack Obama mocked his opponent, Mitt Romney:

"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed."

This 'horses and bayonets' exchange generated 105,000 tweets per minute on the debate hashtag. Why do people take Obama's word at face value, but think Mitt Romney lies through his teeth? This drives me crazy, because it's a fallacy. We know that Obama either was either fairly liberal with the truth in regards to this exchange, or, as Commander-in-Chief, he is hopelessly out of touch with the Defence Forces. How do we know this?

It turns out the marines use bayonets quite a bit, and horses are used to get around Afghanistan, as they are one of the easiest forms of transportation. I guess Obama's not as in touch with his military as he likes to proclaim. Although focusing on such a trivial point shows that Obama was a little desperate as he tried to deflect attention from the deaths in Benghazi in the foreign policy debate and any kind of questions whatsoever to do with the economy.

POTUS & the Veep

I’m not sure how to put this, American cyberbot friends, so I’ll just say it as undiplomatically as is necessary – please, please do not screw up your vote in your forthcoming presidential election and vouch for that democrat Barack Obama again. 

Why do I care, when I live in Australia? Well I care a lot, actually, because the result of your election affects the economies of the rest of the world, so there's that.  See the power and influence you wield?  So please spare a thought for the koala bears when you're ticking those boxes on the ballot paper.   

Not that many of you give a rats about your electoral process.  Only 61.6% of Americans turned out to vote in the last presidential election in 2008, which means 98,000 registered voters just couldn't be arsed.  I really don't understand this reticence, but then I do live in a democracy that has a compulsory voting system, which means you will be fined and/or jailed if you don’t put in an appearance on election day, so there's that.

Although, I've recently had my local government election, and out of a town with 300,000 registered voters we had over 7,000 donkey votes, which mean we either have a lot of seriously stupid people who don't understand the extremely simplistic voting form, or there are a lot of fake-voters who think they are making some type of compelling protest by completely disengaging from the process.

I suspect it's a heady combination of both.  As far as I'm concerned, to change things you need to connect yourself by participating and becoming engaged.  And vote correctly.  For Mitt Romney.  Heh.

I know voting is generally a choice between the guy who was able to spend 100 millions on campaign advertising and the other guy who could only afford 99 million, but please try to show up on election day, Americans.  I'm sure there is a polling booth somewhere on the way to your nearest McDonalds.  

The last four years have been one long cupcake moment (I don't know what this is - just made it up - I do that) for incumbent POTUS Barack Obama, but he is not presidential material, and has done nothing more than screw up your declining healthcare system and devastate your economy for the past four years.  The status quo ain't working and the spending ain't sustainable.  

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Veep-in-waiting, Paul Ryan, is the Chair of the vastly uninteresting-sounding House of Reps Budget Committee, and knows his stuff backwards, so give these guys a chance, y'all.

This post probably doesn't deserve a title.

I don't know about you, cyberbot person, but I turn pretty much everything I do into a competition. I can't help it. If someone is walking a few metres ahead of me into work then I must overtake them at some point before we get to the security gates.

Because blazing through first while they piss around trying to find their security pass in their handbag/manbag is sort of cheating, even though in the real world it means I win. But it's not a competition, apparently, so let's move on.

I write of high stakes rivalry because I am currently engaged in such a venture with myself, which is fairly advantageous for me because winner takes all and I win either way.

The competition is to beat my 2011 blog post count in 2012. I’ve got nine to go to smash it. Cool, I guess only eight now. 

Disclaimer: I'm really tired and I think my brain went to bed hours ago.

Intergalactic Toys

Ho hum.  I'm starting to think my brain may shortly explode out of frustration that it is forced to operate inside a humanoid whose existence is so mind-numbingly dull.  Trapped in a life of averageness, it is.  Poor brain.  It has so many dreams and aspirations, and I make it go to the public service every day.  FFS I am so bored with it all.    

I have been feeling this way inclined for some time now, but I blame my latest bout of angst firmly on Felix Baumgartner, that Austrian daredevil, spacetravelling nutjob, who jumped from the egde of outer space to earth.  As one does sometimes.  Flippin' mad, he is.     

The first thing I did on seeing the white-suited man who can jump footage was scold him mercilessly through the televisual set for being so damn irresponsible.  Everyone knows it's just lunacy to have Red Bull before you have your Corn Flakes.  Honestly, I don't know where his head was.  The second thing I noticed was how that crazy gravity thing is still working just ticketyboo.  And they said it wouldn't take off.

And after that I was just utterly pissed off that my life doesn't consist of intergalactic hot air balloon rides or random hurtlement through the atmosphere at 1,000-ish kilometres over the speed limit or the fact that there is never any doubt or vague concern whatsoever about whether my parachute will hold up until I get to the printer in my workplace.  Felix may be flippin' nuts, but at least he's living it and loving it.  Or maybe he was just a bored public servant in a past life.

The only reason 58 billion people watched the "show" anyway was because there was a chance of Felix's brain exploding during The YouTube's live(ish) feed.  Maybe I have more in common with him than I think.

I heart this photo.

Speaking of outer space and things not being where they ought, one of NASA's retired space shuttles rolled through the dodgy streets of one of the newly treeless, gang-ridden, ghetto regions of Los Angeles on its way to a museum to begin its new life as an oversized dust catcher.  

I'm surprised the shuttle made it through the 'burbs without being tagged by young hooligans.  The ultimate graffiti challenge.   I can't look at these shuttles without wondering how all that gaffer tape stays stuck on its nosecone.  There are many reasons I don't work at NASA, and that little thought bubble is presumably one of them.

Excuses and Political Signs

I guess I'll jump right in then and discuss a couple of boring things that happened today.  I realise that's probably not an ideal method to approach a blog post, but this was my ridiculous idea from earlier in the week to encourage myself to write more, and it seemed like a really good idea at the time.

Hm, where to begin?  I believe I'll start with exercise and excuses.  Unlike many of my acquaintances, I like to own my excuses and I call them where I see them.  For example, I don't go running because I hate cardio and I find it mind-numbingly boring.  And I also don't run because I can be quite lazy at times. 

But I hear a bunch of excuses - all day, every day - from many people on why they simply cannot exercise in this lifetime.  For example, I can't exercise in the cold.  I can't exercise because I have children and I don't have time.  I twisted my ankle thirty years ago; it might not be healed yet.  I can't exercise because my life is so busy and important and I just couldn't possibly fit anything else into my action-packed, yet sedentary, lifestyle.

Apart from the sometimes valid children escape clause, none of these are valid excuses.  I know this because I've used them all.  Apart from the kids one.  I think you need to own children before you can use it.

We women are the worst at whinging about having to exercise.  I'm surprised I don't hear more women saying, "well, I was due to go work for NASA as a rocket scientist, but then I fell pregnant".  These women have an excuse for everything.  Everyone has time to exercise, you just have to want to make the time.  And stop using your children as a basis for the web of excuses.

So today I went for a run - walk - run - walk; I think it's called interval training, but I call it interdevil training, because it basically sucks on a massive scale.  But I don't want to be an Excuse Person, so I will continue as best I can.

Speaking of painfully, boring things, next Saturday is the A.C.T. local election, which is of little interest to anyone in the A.C.T, let alone the rest of the world.  I think they have changed the rules around the use of political advertising around this neck of the woods, because there are a lot more signs stuck into the dirt on the side of the road than there used to be.

Today I noted that these signs are predominatly pro-Labor, which means the Labor factions have ripped out the Liberal ones.  I wouldn't vote Labor if my life depended on it, but I think this unsporting behaviour is typical of how that side behaves as a general rule.  They are either ripping out Liberal placards in the middle of the night or claiming sexism as an implausible excuse for political failures.  That's all they do.  Such great role models for the kiddies.

What else happened?  Nothing.  It turns out this latest writing thing is an abject failure.  I think I will have to think up a new tactical plan to get me in the writing mood.

Political Fight and African Flight

There are far too many ism's in the world - sexism, criticism - I get them all so very mixed up. Evidently the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Ei-leen Gillard, gets these two ism’s confused all the time too, screeching 'sexism!' when valid criticism is thrown at her over her government's poor performance.  

Gillard is currently swimming, although I imagine will soon be sinking, into the mire of her self-created gender war. As far as one can tell, this war on men is motivated by a bitter hatred and resentment of her male competition, and is fed by the preposterous, delusional assumption that women will support her in her desperate attempt to cling to power at the forthcoming federal election.

I personally don’t have a scintilla of interest in anything she says. And I'm not going to call her my Prime Minister because that woman is a horrible embarrassment to me. If you are in any doubt about whether I aided her party’s accession to power, I can advise that I did not. So glad to clear that up.

Speaking of swimming in the mire, I am fairly devoid of any motivation to exercise at present. Why can’t I just be naturally fit? If I lived in the wilds of some arid African desert I wouldn't need to go to the gym because I’d naturally be in tiptop shape. It would be super; I'd spend my days chasing things, and then hastily turning around and having things pursue me.

Wouldn’t we all prefer that? Rather than spending the best part of our day sitting at a desk staring at an electronic box? Hm, I suppose not. Although unfortunately we live in a manufactured environment that gives rise to low health and fitness level by default.

Toasters, Spooks and Neeson

One has a new idea of how to inspire one's jaded fingers to write every day.  I really don't know which part of 'you will write something every day' my digits don’t understand.  So each day for the rest of October (loosely defined as 'when I can be bothered to make an effort') I'm going to pick out three significant things that happened during the day that grabbed my attention and wax lyrical about them for sentences and sentences until I get uber bored.

Sure, it will make for some mind-numbingly dull blog posts, but then I'm most likely definitely not going to read them.   Let's pretend that I started doing this annoying, stupid little activity yesterday.  Yesterday was all about toasters, spooks and Liam Neeson.

I haven't got much to say about the toaster situation, suffice to say that people who operate these semi-heavy machinery things oughta monitor their wholemeal bread more closely and attend court-appointed Toaster Awareness Seminars if they fail to do so.  But, alas, there are brave people out there who fearlessly put out flames of yeast and smoking slabs of over-cooked bread.  Now let's all pause to think about firemen for a moment...

I don't know how to segue effortlessly onto the issue of unearthly bodies, so I won't bother.  It seems spooks are everywhere.  That's ghosts, not spies; but I suppose they amount to the same thing.  Several people I know are currently experiencing seismic paranormal activity in their respective houses, and news of these happenings scares the living daylights out of me.  I don't even want to believe in the paranormal, but there is too much weird, unexplained activity going on.

There's enough scary and dodgy in the natural world to freak me out, let alone things that don't really belong here anymore.  No offence ghosts, but I'm looking at you.  And I would greatly appreciate if you would never come visit me at my home, expecially if I'd never met you when you were alive.

I'm fairly positive I saw a ghost years ago, and I have had a former pet come to me - who had died years before - so I know they are here, but I'm definitely in de river denial over it.  But still, they are here (italics used to denote spookiness).

Speaking of spooky stuff, last night I went to the movies to watch an action flick, and the cinema rudely ran a trailer of the new Paranormal Activity blockbluster - I think they are up to number 28 or something - and I accidently opened my eyes during a particularly terrifying bit.  Admittedly, I am a scaredy cat and find the mere sight of the movie logo terrifying, but anyway. 

Now, onto Liam Neeson, who would no doubt recognise a toaster if one apparated before his eyes in the middle of the night.  And then he'd shoot it.  I'm not trying to name drop or anything, but Liam and I did spend some quality time yesterday.  Sure, he was in a movie, and I was watching the movie in a cinema, but I really don't appreciate society insisting that I make that distinction.

Crankypants Ocean

I currently reside on the South Coast of Australia. When I say reside, I mean I’m here for five days. I came down for the sun, that burning yellow thing in the sky that I like to follow around, because it makes me happy.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I haven’t seen the sun for two days I would have been greedily lapping it up. And today, finally, the sun came out. THE SUN IS OUT!! I am so darn happy to see it I can’t even tell you. If I wanted to live in a dark, damp cave without the sun I would go and live in England or something.

Today is perfect beach weather – particularly if you were from Lapland and didn’t mind a bit of a cool breeze - so I decided to go for an early morning walk (um, 9:00am is my early) along the beach, but it seems the ocean had other ideas.

The first red flag should have been that there were no other people along the whole coastline, as far as the eye could see. The second red flag should have been that there were no red flags to tell people where they could and couldn’t swim.  The third was no surfers. 

The absence of these key features are not ideal near the sea – which can often be a cantankerous pain in the arse - and intelligent people probably would have noted that. I, of course, naively ignored the forewarnings, or lack thereof, and went along my merry way. And what I discovered is if you are not smart enough to realise that the ocean doesn’t want you around then it will soon tell you.

Maybe I had come at a bad time, perhaps the ocean was redecorating, and decluttering; it was certainly throwing out everything it didn’t want. Seaweed, coke bottles, bits of fallen trees, me. It was high tide as well, so I didn’t have much legroom, and at one point she had me pinned in at the seawall and doused me with icy water up to my thighs until I rolled on top of the sandbar.  Yes, I rolled, like Bear Grylls might do.  It was all very exciting.  And cold.  More cold than exciting, really.

I cursed a fair bit, laughed it off, and then came the wind; and when a strong gale and beach combine they produce a perfect machine gun effect that fires stinging sand bullets at your arms and legs. So I went running, sobbing, from the beach, or something like that. There’s nothing like being rejected by the ocean; a living, breathing body of water that doesn’t want you around.  I might try again later; when she’s in a better mood…

Coastal Retreat Treat

I'm kinda fed up with the whole Canberra thing.  I'm utterly bored and miserable here.  I'm not doing what I want to be doing for a career - how the hell did that happen? - and every day I get more and more fed up with it.  It's like groundhog day without Bill Murray.  I would do just about anything to be self-employed.  But how does one change careers when you are in a secure job?  How the hell do people just jump and change careers anyway?  Scary times, indeed.

My birthday is this week.  If you are interested - and who wouldn't be - I will be turning 18 again, with 10 plus years experience.  I'm taking the day off work, because there is nothing more annoying than people at work celebrating your birthday and making so-called humourous references to how freaking old you are and everyone staring at you while you try and cut the cake like they've never seen someone cut a fucking cake before. 

And you're supposed to smile and take it.  I know it's cake, and I will usually do just about anything for a slice of cake (there is vast empirical evidence), but the whole activity just to get the cake is annoying.  Happy birthday, indeed. 

So I've got a five-day weekend coming up and I'm going to a detox farm.  Yes, a detox farm.  You know the place; full of angry humans who haven't eaten chocolate for a week, wheatgrass shots and starry-eyed hippies, those people that God later turns into corporate executives just to make sure we never lose our sense of irony.  Well my detox farm is going to be sort of like that, but mostly nothing like that.  Because it's going to be fun, for a start.

I'm going to a house down the south coast of Australia to pretend that I don't live in Canberra at all and that I am actually a coastal local.  Although the weather is predicted to be downright summerish, so there will be a lot of my fellow Canberrans lurking around, so I will be forced to brandish a faux moustache and novelty glasses when I head around town so no-one I know will recongise me.  Small price to pay.

I will go to the zoo, I will write, I will read, I will walk, I will attend the markets, I will buy useless and possibly hideous trinkets at the markets, and I will snigger endlessly at the tourists who must go back to work on Tuesday.  Oh wait.

Play Safe

Following the abduction, rape and murder of Melbourne woman, Jill Meagher, last week, there has been a lot of blithering by feminists on a woman's right to feel safe on the streets after dark.

Of course women have a right to feel safe - we are bloody entitled to it - but events in Australia this week have shown that this theory clashes with reality, because rapists and murderers don't care about women's rights. And feminists are doing women a great disservice by not acknowledging that.

Exhibit A: SlutWalk in Canada, an annual event where progressives push a women's rights agenda when the focus for feminists should be on how to stay alive during a violent mugging / sexual assault / attempted abduction.  Yes, women should be able to do anything we want to do, and we should be able to wear anything we want to wear, but the reality is we can't.  It’s all very well campaigning how things ought to be in a perfect world, but women need real life skills that may save their life one day.

It seems to me a reasonable thing to do to ensure you have a safe night out is to look at things from the perspective of an opportunistic rapist/murderer, and then do the exact opposite of what they would consider the most suitable working conditions for doing what they do. Yes, that is totally unfair and often downright inconvenient for women, but, again, rapists don’t really care that we might find it unfair.

Rapists want you to walk home by yourself, and they want you to walk near back alleys, and they want you to have nothing to protect yourself with, and they want you to be drunk enough to make bad judgement calls about all these things. The Salvation Army have people on the city streets of Australia most nights, trying to protect vulnerable women from predators who target this exact behaviour.

A lot of women feel disempowered by having to take safety precautions on the streets after dark, but creating an environment where opportunistic rapists and murderers are unable to flourish means the predators are the ones who are disempowered.  None of this is fair to women, but who the hell wants to take the risk?

I think the police do a brilliant job overall securing and protecting the community, and they did a remarkable job solving the Meagher case despite the tragic outcome.  The police may say the streets are safe, but none of us feel safe.

I never, ever feel safe on the streets at night by myself, and I don't think I know many women who do. There is always a niggling fear in the forefront of your mind.  And no, it's not fair that many women feel that way, but that's life, and it keeps you cautious.

I think women should report every single occurrence where they feel unsafe on the streets; every event that they would previously not report because they feel that no-one is going to care, or that it's somehow so commonplace that it's not worth giving a statement.

Shut-Up Money - The new airline customer service

I've just started a complaints process against Qantas Airways, following their brilliant fuckup of my lost baggage in July, which left me fairly disgruntled and devoid of underpants for six days.

I was watching the mainstream news the other night and I spied one of the flying red kangaroo tails in a story concerning airline ticket costs or maintenance or unions or missing underpants or something, and I realised that the mere mention or sight of the airline now elicits a novel type of fury. On my pissed-off scale, qantas angry falls only a few places below road rage.

Following those jerks jerking me around for the first few days of my recent overseas jaunt, Qantas have offered me compensation - which more than covers my emergency costs - for losing then failing to deliver my baggage to me. They have also offered to provide me with a letter for my insurance company so I can recoup what I spent on emergency personal effects, such as underpants and the like.

Well there is a catch, of course. To receive the compensation and letter for my insurance company - which I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to anyway - I have to sign a confidentiality agreement. A secret underpants accord, if you will.

This release absolves Qantas and American Airlines, the other carrier involved in the complex, tangled mess, of any accountability or responsibility or answerability or liability for their indefensible customer service. It's been two weeks and I still can't sign the darn thing. I'm not sure I will be able to. 

I imagine that sounds a little ridiculous, because they are offering to cover my expenses more than three-fold, but I'm pretty pissed off that they want to wipe their slate clean, presumably so they can screw over the next passenger, and then the next and the next. 

I do recall that I was sobbing on the phone to their baggage claims call centre at one stage when I was in Florida out of anger and tiredness and desperation and sheer frustration with their customer service.  So I can't just take their shut-up money. I can't do it.

But it seems shut-up money is the new customer service. I was let down fairly appallingly by a major airline that probably should spend a bit more time providing a level of service to customers that is commensurate with the pricey airfares they expect us to fork out for a seat on a plane that isn't comfortable for ten minutes let alone ten hours.

And when things go wrong, which they invariably do, instead of some type of human empathy, you get a robotic reply from the Qantas Claims office that tells you they are sorry you were inconvenienced, but with no accommpanying explanation for the extensive list of right royal fuckups you experienced while trying to retrieve your baggage.

I suppose I was naive to expect they would bother to look like they care about customer service, but I certainly wasn't expecting a glib, veiled attempt at blackmail. I imagine it is merely a reflection of the litigious era we find ourselves in, so who can blame big business for taking this approach. It's probably standard business practice to them, but it's just more flawed customer service to me.

So I find myself in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I hate when life throws you pickles. Despite my disdain for any type of confrontation, and equal disdain for those who routinely choose to eagerly engage in it, I've decided that I'm going to be morally outraged for a while, push back a little, ask a few more questions about their complaints process, ask Qantas for a review of my complaint and then engage the ombudsman and trade practices people if need be.

What do I want from Qantas?  In a perfect world you'd expect something that vaguely resembles some type of accountability - or some loose explanation - in what appears to be a gaping hole in Qantas policy regarding on-delivery of baggage to cities they don't fly to.  But why would they bother with apologies or explanations when they have shareholders' money to throw at disgruntled customers to keep them quiet.

Am I wasting my time?  I am under no illusion that I won't get stonewalled.  But I can't just sign that thing. 

The Incredible Shrinking Mountain

I don't know if this is an Australian thing, but plastic bottles ain't what they used to be. Coca-Cola Amatil, the makers of the deliciously tasteless Mount Franklin spring water beverage, have decided that the best way to completely piss off the thirsty people of Australia is to use 35% less plastic in their new easy-crush bottles.

That's great, CCA executives; a container that's easy to crush when empty. But you know what that means? It means it's also friggin' easier to crush while your drinking it.  Or when you twist open the lid a bit too heavy-handedly.  I bet this was one of those massively stupid decisions that chief executives make when they are brushing their teeth in the morning. 

I thought I was bulking up a bit too much at the gym before I read the side panel advertising the incredible shrinking bottle. CCA claims that one little bottle now creates a carbon footprint that is 27% lighter than the previous little bottle. A lighter carbon footprint, my arse. You sell your products in plastic, you dickheads.  I imagine it's more to do with reducing overheads than saving the world, but kudos where kudos are due.

All the inner city hipsters with their hippy, environmentally friendly lifestyles have probably whipped out their special wind-powered calculators they use to measure the square root of their carbon footprint and have figured this is a good enough deal to stop drinking water straight out of a grimy tap in a back alley and start buying plastic.

Anyone who hoodwinks the hipsters into believing they are saving the earth – which has been perfectly capable of looking after itself for 4.5 billion years without their help - gets my stamp of approval. 

R.I.P Beautiful Kane

15 August 1998 - 4 September 2012

I miss you so much already, little Kaney. When I'm ready I'm going
to blog about you so I never forget exactly how amazing you were.

Face Deactivation

Today I temporarily deactivated my Facebook account.  There are a couple of reasons why I logged off.  The first reason is that I was ever so slightly addicted to the daily bombardment of mindless, self-absorbed drivel every five damn seconds from some people.  Yes, we all have morning tea, but it's really not interesting enough for public consumption, so to speak.

I would never suppose that anyone would be vaguely interested in what I had for morning tea, or what I was doing at 2pm every damn day.  Yes, that's a real thing apparently.  WHAT THEY ARE DOING AT 2PM EVERY DAY.  I'm not saying their drivel is unimportant, but I have better things to do with my time than trawl through it.  And whenever I logged on I was there for a while, doing nothing in particular for the most part.  Facebook can be a massive time consumer, if you let it.   

I still use email to keep in contact with people - yes, totally ol' fashioned - but the rest I don't need to know about all the time.  Although, while it is snuggly ensconced in the land of social media, I can't imagine ever deactivating my little blog - it's just me, my words and my own little world. I heart it.

The other reason for cutting off bits of social media is because I want to start writing my e-book, so I'll need all the spare time I can get my hands on.  Yes, I want to start writing a fictional psychological thriller e-book. I do. What's wrong with that? It's so not above my means. Being successful at it (for example: finishing it) is very possibly above my means, but w'ever. I'm sort of mostly convinced that I can do it. What I do know is that you can't achieve anything if you don't give it a shot. 

I recently read an article about Australian action thriller uberauthor, Matthew Reilly, who offered advice to budding writers such as, 'if you want to be a writer, then call yourself a writer'. Makes perfect sense I suppose.

Write 'writer' on your tax return.  Tell Homeland Security you're a writer when they interrogate you over your supposedly dodgy fingerprints. Reilly didn't mention that one; the thought of important paperwork just reminded me of one of the more poignant moments of my recent trip to the United States of Crazy. Homeland Security; that's what holidays are made of (my apologies to Van Halen).

I'm also a bit put off by the phenomena of social media at the moment following the Tom Daley and Charlotte Dawson Twitter incidents.  Both Daley, a U.K. Olympic diver, and Dawson, an Australian TV personality, were viciously bullied by so-called Twitters 'trolls'.

Can it only be a matter of time before Facebook descends into the same vexatious, provocative and often downright ugly death roll as Twitter?  Truly horrible what those with troubled minds and/or a lack of any morals or values are capable of when they are able to anonymously spew hate.

Whether the Weather be Cold

I've been regularly monitoring the BOM (Australian Bureau of Meteorology) website for weather updates for the past half hour, because apparently I have nothing better to do on this frickin' freezing winter's night.  Evidently Canberra has not received the memo stating that it will be spring in one and a half hours.  But I suppose there is never really a good reason to monitor a weather website.  Oh well, you'll just have to find a way to deal with it all.

In the past half hour Canberra was -2.6, then -3.5, then -2.3, then -1.9, with no discernible abnormal wind gusts.  Does anyone on planet earth understand meteorology? Can anyone say meteorology 10 times really fast? It's probably to do with boring air pressure or isobars or whatever.  I'm going to create my own weather website that's less confusing, where the temperature doesn't go up and down every five damn seconds.

The Curse of the Mandarin

Since I've returned from my holiday to the United States of Crazy, I've stupidly begun a healthy eating diet, which people tell me means I need to eat health food or I fail.  Well that's got recipe for disaster written all over it then, doesn't it?

So I've been eating a lot of healthy food lately, and lots of fruit, which isn't much different to usual.  But the word on the street is that fruit is healthier for you than chocolate.  Wha...??  While I find this so-called 'fact' fairly difficult to stomach, I'm going to give health food (italics used to denote derision) a shot in the name of eating-options-that-are-brain-debilitatingly-boring.

Now, bananas.  I've always been a big banana fan. They are delicious, zero drama and easy to consume.  No mess, no fuss; just a completely psychologically balanced fruit that appears to have no discernible personality disorders.  My type of fruit. I hate crazy fruit.

Citrus fruit, on the other hand, make me fairly angry. Take mandarins. They have an obstructionist manner that I just cannot tolerate. There are simply too many steps involved in eating a mandarin. I ate a mandarin today. This is what happened to me - I'm sure you've had a similar experience. Step one is always choosing one that doesn't smell like it has been invaded by a herd of marauding worms.

Step two involves peeling the damn thing; like I have nothing better to do with my time.  Mandarins need to take a banana leaf out of the famous yellow fruit's book and learn how to be peel friendly. No-one will ever love you if you continue to be a narcissistic, passive aggressive ball of hard to peel, orange annoyingness.

Step three brings you to the eating stage, but that doesn't mean you can rest on your laurels. There is still much work to be done. The eating stage involves monitoring the fruit for pips, of which there are usually about 500 of the damn things in every segment of mandarin.  And the final stage is mandarin juice.  Everywhere!  This fruit is so annoying.  

Mangoes are one of my favourite summer snacks, but they can also be quite frustrating, given that one can only eat about 30% of the fruit, and it is so slippery and slimy you need to take a shower after you've dealt with it.

I've only just started noticing avocados, after a life filled with fear and terror of putting the green slime in my mouth. They have rapidly become one of my favourite snacks, even though they come with a big pointless stone in their centre.  I think that's about it.

RIP First Moon Man

I get goose bumps whenever I hear Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldren talk about their mission to the moon; arguably one of the most famous days in history.   Armstrong has just passed away at 82 - much to the devastation of me.

He was a great, humble man, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time recently viewing the extensive tribute to him, his fellow astronauts and all the space missions at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

NASA have long stopped caring about the conspiracy theorists and the wacky accusations the space agency faked the moon landing in an elaborate U.S. Government publicity stunt.

The so-called evidence base for the nonsensical conspiracy claims were dubious mood lighting, dodgy radiation level readings, the silky, softness of the moon's surface, and impeccable camera angles and footage, all of which have been credibly explained through evidence of the technical variety that lovers of secret plots get all cranky about. 

All but the most passionate conspiracy theorists seem to have put the fake moon landing old wives' tale to bed, what with the fact that it would be practically impossible to cover up and Soviet Russia would have sniffed out a scam a long time ago.

Although in 1982 NASA hired a space writer to definitively debunk the hare-brained rumours but decided against it, because clearly they had better things to do.  Why indeed give the clueless conspiracy nutters any more air time? 

On my recent trip to NASA I noted some compelling evidence indicating an actual moon landing in the grainy footage of all the rocket scientists and engineers at Houston Mission Control, as they tried to hide their complete horror and devastation when communication was lost with Apollo 11 moments before the 1969 landing.

Obviously NASA have a fabulous central casting unit and hired the best actors and extras of their generation for the moon landing because the raw emotion with tears, hair-raising stress and then sheer joy and exhilaration is fairly difficult to fake even if you are a talented actor like Snooki.

Armstrong was instrumental in landing the lunar module without any really useful assistance from Mission Control.  The spot that Houston had programmed in for the landing turned out to be replete with massive craters, gigantic speed bumps and deep potholes.  Obviously the local council just couldn't be arsed fixing the area up.  I guess that's a whole of solar system thing.  Plus it was the middle of the night and there were no street lights or, um, moonlight so he couldn't see very well.

So Armstrong decided to travel a bit further to find a place where he could parallel park without falling into a ditch or being carjacked by E.T.  By the time he landed, there was only about 30 seconds of gas left in the tank, so there was that too.  There isn't a petrol station close to you when you run out of gas on earth so good luck with that on a lunar space mission.  On top of that there was the whole first-man-on-the-moon expectation, so no pressure there.

RIP Mr Armstrong.

The Tart Adventures of Harry & Julian

Oh, Prince Harry.  I imagine one's grandmother is not terribly amused at one's tawdry shenanigans in the skank capital of the entire solar system with a bunch of trashy American hookers or their classy equivalent.  

Seriously, who knew there were so many cheap and tacky trashbags in the world, prepared to whip their clothes off for the international media due to their incessant need for attention?  Oh wait, we did know that.  These women are everywhere, in many shapes and sizes of Kardashian.

I imagine the latest bunch of promiscuous ladettes are employed in professions involving poles and the ensuing dancing around of or else they wouldn't be too comfortable parading themselves so overwhelmingly underdressed in a global public forum in what appears to be a bit of a honey trap. 

And I think we all know what Harry's Scotland Yard detail were doing during the naked hotel room polo match romp or whatever it was.  I imagine the attention to detail was there, but it probably wasn't focused on handing out fines for unladylike behaviour under The Police Act 1827.  I imagine what those boys want right now is an Invisibility Cloak.

In other media tart-related news, embattled Wikileaker Julian 'Sausaage' Assange is still stuck in the middle of a war-torn nation state that is not a signatory to the Geneva Convention.  Or else he's still glamprisoned in posh war-torn Knightsbridge in Ecuadorian Britain on his blow-up camp bed.  I keep getting those two confused.

Assange's Wikileaks reminds me of the wind-up jewellery box I had as a kid, which opens to the sound of ballerina music - with a magnetised ballerina flippin' around like a drunken lout on the mirrored centre stage.

Although when you pry open the Wiki box, you get a garbled lecture from Assange on blah, blah, blah, I'm going to humiliate the United States of Crazy by exposing their secrets, blah, blah, blah.  But much to the chagrin of the wannabe Bond, the United States weren't humiliated; they were just plainly and understandably rightly pissed off.

I agree that Assange should be able to release anything he wants on his Wikileaks files, but I also think he needs to accept that there are consequences to those actions.  He hasn't got his head around that yet.  Probably never will.

Of course nation states have secrets.  There's nothing wrong with government secrets when you are dealing with sociopathic middle eastern nations.  We wouldn't have the freedoms we do if governments didn't have secrets.  Oh the irony of it all, Julian.  Secrets are how countries negotiate their way through the brutal and bloody minefield that is global politics.
 
Like a game of poker, you keep your game face on, your cards close to your chest and you hedge your bets, hoping the guy on your left who is winning is from the West and not the Middle East.  But you never, ever show your hand, Julian.  It goes a little something like that.

And then along comes the progressive leftwinger windbag who decides to open the damn pandora's jewellery box in the name of open governance.  No such thing as open governance in global political affairs; people couldn't handle the truth anyway, my 'pinion. 

Kindling on the Beach

I have no idea who invented personal e-book readers, but when Amazon rubbed a bunch of twigs together to create their little Kindle, they lit a fire under armchair reading enthusiasts all over the world, which turned into a bonfire that would consume unsuspecting publishing houses around the globe. 

And, fortunately, these little electronic spot fires would allow booklovers to stop tearing their hair out when planning and packing their carry-on luggage for an international holiday. 

It meant that we no longer had to drag around a bunch of dog-earred airport novels from one country to the next, but it also means preeminent authors like hotel room heiress Paris Hilton probably no longer have an avenue to air their distinguished works.  Which is a tragedy.  Bonfire of the vanities, indeed.

Even if you weren't a big reader back in those pre-e days, everyone travelled with books, just in case your airline of choice decided to make you wait five hours in a deserted airport in Narita, Japan with nothing to entertain yourself but a completed cryptic crossword, sans eraser!  Because that never happens anymore. 

But thank god for the dichotomy of travelling with books, says Random House.  They possibly didn't say that at all, but you just know that's what they're thinking. 

Bookworms love the convenience and comfort of travelling light with an e-reader, but if you are going to a beach in a land far, far away, then you need to take an actual printed book, because Kindles don't do sand. 

Whoever invented e-book readers wasn't much of a beach bum.  Thank god for beaches too, says Random House.  I bet they did say that.

While electronic gadgets are superb for the international traveller, they are not terribly useful for international beachbummers on Waikiki Beach, where cheesy paperback, soft porn airport novels rule supreme, due to their ability to more often that not survive a random salt water attack of any magnitude.

Back in the Box

Today was my first day back at work following a month long vacay to the United States of Crazy.  Despite the fact that I couldn't go for a swim in Waikiki at 11:00, I somehow, miraculously, survived the day and ended with the same chill-Mahalo-Hawaiian attitude that gripped me in Oahu.  Brilliant.

It might have something to do with my habit of keeping my expectations low so the worst that can happen to me is that I occasionally get a bit surprised.  But attending a seminar on the Budget Life Cycle didn't help matters at all and possibly shortened my own life cycle.

After you have had a break from your life for a while, it seems that you need to relearn a lot of basic things that previously were completed in an automatic fashion, like walking on the right side of the footpath, and how much is the pentagon shaped coin worth, and, you know, the way to work and where to park.   

So I'm going to try and put myself back in the box and stop thinking about Hawaii for 24 hours a day, because I really don't think that'll fit in with my Canberra lifestyle, unfortunately.  Reality is a cruel mistress.  The conservative Canberra public servant box feels more like a coffin that is being lowered into the ground while I'm kicking and screaming, "I'm still alive!  Let me out!" 

Airline Seat Reclining Charge

I used to love travelling on a plane when I was in my twenties. The thrill of venturing somewhere new and exploring one random dirty, germ-ridden foreign city after another. The excitement when the air hostess brought around the food trolley so you could spend the next 30 minutes trying to open your teensy weensy plastic cutlery bag.

The cramped spaces didn't inconvenience me at all, the detestable passengers weren't on my radar, the waiting around and queues didn't trouble me that much, the seats were comparatively larger (in my mind only, apparently), and I'm sure that the flight attendants were far more affable than the current crop..

I've just returned from a luxurious and often draining month-long holiday to the United States, leaving a trail of seven domestic and international plane flights, numerous shuttles, many bus trips, a few taxi rides and a couple of ferry rides in my wake.

These days I'm rarely a happy long haul traveller. The most recent flight, from Hawaii to Sydney, was particularly frustrating. Flying Law dictates that the dick sitting in front of you will always thrust back their seat in an attempt to be horizontal, thus rendering your limbs useless for a period of around ten hours. If you are especially blessed, they will leave it that way during meal time.

I have found that these passengers are generally the same self-absorbed, whining, whinging morons who demand the air hostess pays attention to their pathetic little requests on an hourly basis. I'm not really sure how flying economy creates a sense of entitlement, but anyway.

On my recent flight home I had a middle-aged Australian women - let's her call her Princess Bitchface - who thought she was in first class and wound back her seat to a completely unacceptable level.  When I politely asked her - through gritted teeth - to put her seat forward at meal time she argued with me that the seat in front was back and she had no room. I stared at it and then told her it wasn't. So she begrudgingly put it forward.

For the rest of the flight I was enormously tempted to remove my scarf, lean over the chair, and put myself out of my misery. But I deemed the plane too cold, so that plan was put on the backburner until it got a bit warmer.

I could have pulled out the old mile high insanity plea at my arraignment. Or just get a couple of fellow considerate travellers on my jury. I'm pretty sure this is the reason they don't allow weapons on planes; because the sky would be a bloodbath.

Jetstar may be a subsidiary of Qantas but they charge you for everything you do, which is the direction most airlines are moving in. Ka-ching, ka-ching. Blankets cost money, water will incur a charge on your credit card and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I tell you, I don't mind paying more for a non-budget airline ticket if it creates the illusion of customer service. Frequent Flyers paid for this trip, but I ain't flying Jetstar again internationally.

Qantas have said that their reclining seats are here to stay, so I think it is time that they start to impose a seat reclining charge system. Perhaps an electric shock for customers when they push their seat beyond a reasonable level, or a timing system, or a $500 charge on their credit card when they keep it back during dinner time. Welcome to Australia! I friggin' love this idea.

Duchess Kate's Full Plate

I've been a travellin' man for the past month, so I haven't caught much of the London Olympics. I know a lot people whinge that the Games are stupid and contrived and full of cheats that shouldn't rely on Government handouts to do their job, but I generally find that the people who make these claims are just projecting their own life's setbacks through an elite sporting event.

Okay, we get that you weren't picked for your high school basketball team, but get over it already.

I've just arrived back in the country, in time for the final days of competition, so I'm making the most of it, even if I have to make the most of it through the fill-in-the-final-days sports, like BMX biking, sailing and powerwalking through the gardens of Buckinghuge Palace.

Speaking of Her Majesty's digs, I was watching the walking race earlier, where competitors pretend they are elite athletes by engaging in an activity that is often favoured by really old people on zimmer frames to enhance their strength and mobility. 

The race feels like it's going to go for about 28 hours, so I'll check in again tomorrow to see if it's raining yet.  I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess yes.  I noted the subtle landmark tourism campaign that the organisers have employed on the race course.

It weaves right around the Palace and then up and down The Mall. The only thing they could have done to shove the City of Westminster any further down my throat was have the walkers pace furiously up and down the corridors of the Palace with corgis nipping at their nikes.

I have also noted that British uberbrand, Duchess Kate, is leading the London tourism campaign through her attendence at every single event on the Olympic calendar.

The poor girl even had to attend the boxing finals, where I imagine she was forced to sit amongst a bunch of drunk, tattooed deadbeat commoners and watch fierce chicks beat the daylights out of each other in the name of the Olympic Spirit.  Although they were probably trying not to focus on the bit that says to build a peaceful and better world.  Duchess Kate was charmed, I'm sure.

Delta

My flight to New York last week was provided by the wonderful world of Delta, which is less wonderful and more woeful.  Delta is unfortunately named after the symbol in the Greek alphabet meaning slow and inept customer service, or after Australian singing barbie doll, Delta Goodrem.  Either way, not good.

Delta is one of the busiest airlines in the United States.  I don't know why this is the case because they are fairly shite compared to any airline in Australia.  Or maybe it just feels like they're busy when they are really just hopelessly incompetent.

IN other news, I seriously do not know what all the fuss is about New York.  It is dirty and smelly and crowded and noisy and full of brash New Yorkers and other self-absorbed Americans.  What's to like about any of that?

The Great Disney Propaganda Machine

We crept out of the Disney hotel in Florida the other day at the crack of too early in an attempt to escape Brand Disney without detection. We were headed for the concrete jungle of New York City,  where dreams are made of and, according to all reports, bad coffee is brewed.  If I can possibly make it there - and get out of Disney in one piece and without any residual brain washing or damage - then I can make it anywhere. 

The Disney brand even tried to indoctrinate us through videoconferencing facilities on the Magical Express Shuttle Bus on the way to the airport, part of a carefully calculated post-Disney experience no doubt.  Even at the airport you will find Disney and theme park-esque retail outlets trying to steal the last dime out of your pocket.  They will get you eventually it seems; even if you are just passing through Mickeyville.

We sat at Orlando airport for ages and ages, due to a big arse weather system floating in the general vicinity of where we were and were we wanted to be.  I am happy to sit out a monster storm cell, but not so much if the delay is due to a passenger who can't organise themselves to get to the airport on time.

On the last night in Disney we got to see their electrical parade, which is basically an event where all of the most interesting characters and floats are elaborately decorated in humongous chains of Christmas lights and wind up and around Main Street USA, the primary thoroughfare through the park.

I have been trying to scour a good location to view this parade for a week.  Apart from its monotonous brain-spasming catchy tune, it is a pretty decent demonstration of the all-American cheese factory that is Disney.  My favourite float is Peter or someone and his magic dragon or whatever it is, who blows misty fake snot all over the kiddies.  Brilliant.  Perhaps he had Dragon Flu.

With all the muggles and minions floating about, I am surprised I haven't contracted some lethal type of cold or flu or meningococcal from breathing in gross, deadly pathogens at DisneyWorld.  Or at least Type 2 diabetes from all the sugar I have consumed. 

Did I mention the toilets here?  They need to be discussed.  At length and right here.  The Big D thankfully favour toilets that have the decency to flush themselves.  If only people in Australia knew how to do that at shopping centres.  I suppose it is quite a difficult feat to accomplish.  Disney also provide paper toilet seat covers in your stall, presumably so you don't contract some hideous bum disease.

After doing your business, you simply flush the paper bum cheek protector down the gurgler.  The toilet in the hotel room, however, is ridiculously lazy, as it can't really be bothered flushing itself.  Perhaps it only lifts its fingers for tips, like everyone else in the service industry in this country.

The result of this is you have to hold down the lever until it is all gone; like I have nothing more interesting to do.  Fortunately these defunct toilets across America may have saved millions of people from a lifelong pattern of leaving grotty loos for the next person to deal with.

Days of Paleontology

That's a big word, isn't it? Paleontology? I'm sorry, I will endeavour to keep my loquacious confabulations to a minimum.  Most people think paleontology is just about the study of Sarah Palin, but this just isn't true.  It's also about the study of really, really old stuff.  I know, I'm a rocket scientist now.  I have a keyring from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre to corroborate this claim. 

I write on the very topical matter of dinosaurs because my Disney hotel in Florida was replete with baby-sized prehistoric, histrionic tyrannosaurus rex'.  They were everywhere.  They run in front of you as you walk the pavements of the hotel and the evidence that they don't always make it to the other side is smeared on the pretty cobblestones of the Port Orleans, French Quarter themed resort.

Ants - who are, on average, very short - probably don't even know that dinosaurs are extinct.  Not that I've seen any ants in Florida.  Or flies.  America doesn't deserve to not have any flies.  Oh wait, I did see a fly; he/she tried to steal one of my fries.  But that was just one fly, and I think the exception proves the rule, no?

Speaking of things that are or should be extinct, one can buy a leg of a T-Rex to eat for your dinner at Disney.  Or they could be turkey limbs; you really don't know these days.  Especially in Florida; land of the nutjobs.  Many people walk around with these repulsive bits of meat hanging out of their mouth like Captain Caveman, and the meat is all pink and raw-looking and still quivering in its dinosaur booties.  Seriously gross.

In other dinosaur-related hearsay - who knew there would be so much - today I ventured out into big, tall, stinking New York City for a day of stuffed creatures at the American Natural History Museum.  It was chockers full of real, fake and real/fake combo dinosaurs, mammals, tigers and other things I've never heard of.  And it was brilliant. I will discuss this at another time because it is now sleep time for me.

Keep Calm and Carry a Poncho

Woah, baby. Why didn't someone tell me that it's best to attend Disney Boot Camp before spending any time at DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida? Screaming kids, their demented parents, the heat, the humidity and mice called Mickey everywhere.  It's hard work and needs to be trained for, or else you will likely catastrophically injure yourself and/or potentially lose your mind.

Soarin'!

It turns out that I have the patience of people who work with the stupid public for a living.  The place is packed full of Muggles, and I've only wanted to slam people into a wall on a few occasions.

The targets of my mental anguish are mostly American.  I don't, however, think patience is a virtue.  I think hurrying the fuck up and getting out of my way is definitely something to aim for when walking in my vicinity.

Lucky for my fellow Disney goers that the walls at Disney aren't really walls at all; they are generally just a figment of your rapidly deteriorating brain as it grapples with dehydration, one of the early symptoms of the Disney psychosis.

We've been here a few days now and have a routine.  My travelling buddy - who shall not be named because she's scared someone will break into her home in Australia and overwater her plants or dust her shelves or something - love riding Soarin', a five minute simulated hang glider tour of California. 

We love it so much that we get up very early, most days, so we can ride it before the big queues and then we get a fastpass for another go.  A fastpass sort of saves your place in line while you enjoy other attractions in the park, and there are only a limited number given out throughout the day so you have to be quick and organised and efficient and all the things you don't really care to be during your vacay.

Soarin' is the feature attraction at Epcot in DisneyWorld, and we have also been enjoying the caramel treats in Germany in the World Showcase.  If I didn't have travel brain it would have occurred to me this morning that I probably wouldn't usually want to eat a metre squared of caramel topped with milk chocolate. Yeah, that plan shouldn't backfire at all.  Engage brain before eating Disneycrap.

Another thing I am struggling with in Disneytown is sensory overstimulation, so I can't imagine how kids cope with it.  During the evening, especially, there is so much going on and flashing and noise everywhere and bright lights and water splashing and the screaming from rides and screaming from babies and even more screaming from their parents.  It's fucking crazy.  I think the adults are the big ones, but I'm not really sure.

I'm heading to New York City in a few days, which means I'll have to think about more than what I want for breakfast and which rides to entertain myself with.  You don't really have to think at Disney; they shuttle you everywhere if you are staying in the inner circle.

Everything is measured in minutes at Disney.  How long you have to wait for a ride, how far to get here, how far away is the exit, how long do we have to wait until the next fucking shuttle bus.  And Disney minutes are like laundromat minutes, in that they lie, and they take forever to click over.  It's that special magic of Disney.

You are constantly in a holding pattern when you are waiting in queues for rides and they make you weave around and around and fool you into thinking you are actively engaging in pointless interactive games on the walls in the hope that you will momentarily forget that they are stealing an hour of your life for a two minute theme park ride.

And then there's the merchandise. Last week at Universal Studios I bought a hat emblazoned with the theme park logo, because fucking Qantas lost my luggage and I wasn't going to hang out in the hurricane / sunshine state of Florida without sun protection.

And now, since docking at Disney, two security guards, a ferry captain and a Disney character have commented on my hat and its lack of Disney identification.  But I ain't getting one, because too much choice is a prison.  It doesn't help that my rain poncho - built to survive a violent hurricane - is also Universal merchandise.  It's anyone's guess how we haven't been evicted from Disney.

The toilets are called restrooms, but there is no time for rest in there.  The good part is you get to cover your seat with a paper toilet seat cover which you flush down the toilet, providing it doesn't stick to the back of your legs in a half flush reverse pike move.  And even though it only has one job to do, the hotel loo doesn't flush by itself, so you have to hold the lever until the bitter end.  I thought you needed to know that.

Disneyness

Just completed day five in the world of Disney and I feel like the little mouse has burrowed into my brain and left his ears logo etched onto my amygdala.  I am possibly suffering from a psychological disneyorder, if you will.

The amygdala plays a primary role in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events which is probably why I can't stop thinking about this: how the hell do Disney take all the taste out of food? How do they do that?  They magically make an appetising-looking cheeseburger taste like nothing.  We'll never know.  It's the magic of Disney.

We are having a night in from the big D tonight, because it's bloody hard yakka and we forgot to go to theme park boot camp before we came over here.  But it's just a temporary disneychantment; we'll be back out there tomorrow.  You need a lot of stamina to get through the day here.  So, instead, we did some laundry this evening.  I'm sorry if that's not interesting enough for you.

When I was walking back after picking up my clean clothes - so they can get drenched again in Florida's daily torrential downpour/hurricane tomorrow - I could of sworn I saw Mickey's ears in the sky, a la the Batman sign.  See, it's carved into my amygdala.  I don't have any scientific evidence to prove that this is a thing, but I imagine that if anyone can do it Disney will nail the shit out of it.

The one thing that they can't do is keep all the kiddies out of the parks.  Who in their right mind would take children to Disney?!  I can't imagine anything more horrible.  Children are highly annoying, and they completely ruin your day.  And why, for the love of god, do people allow their five-year-old to steer a pram?  For fucks sake.

Every day we are shuttled to any Disney park we want from our hotel.  Driving around the whole Disney complex - highways included - you get the idea that the whole of Orlando is purpose built by the uber multinational, as a snug little home-away-from-home for it's star, Mickey Mouse.  His east coast abode.

Disney don't do dirt. Or cigarette butts on the ground.  Or trash on the side of its highways.  They go above and beyond to keep the place picture perfect.  And it is very much appreciated.  Every tree, every road, every overpass is artificially created, and it seems that nothing is actually real, but everything is in fact very real, just very manufactured.  I actually love this place.

Kids may love Disney, but parents not so much.  I think I witnessed the early warning signs of divorce on at least five occasions today.  Mummy and daddy travelling to crowded theme parks in summer with four kids and the mother-in-law will do that to you.  The Disney staff, however, are so friendly that I suspect they are Disneybots.

I have been fond of Disney since I visited Disneyland in Anaheim two years ago.  It's a brilliant business model; market your company as the happiest place on earth and then people will desperately want to return, even though their pockets are being drained and they become devoid of anything resembling sanity.  Theme park madness, it is.