Eat My Beach Shorts

Deciding what to pack for an overseas trip can be a right nightmare. Contrary to popular belief, being in a land far, far away doesn’t give you licence to wear nothing.  I imagine such impertinence is fine in places like the Netherlands, but the United States has standards, people.  I know, it surprised me too. 

The people who don’t have any trouble packing stuff are those annoying, anal souls who bore you to death with an itemised itinerary of their every toilet break on their vacay and a list of all the things wrong with their hotel room, like anyone cares.  But me, I say packing up your clothes in your old kit bag is trouble, trouble, trouble, and definitely doesn't make me smile, smile, smile.

I like to think that when I travel I will miraculously evolve into a person who suddenly dresses all stylish and hipster, thus I pack so-on-trend clothes that I have previously bought for some inexplicable reason but have never worn, usually because they have proved to be completely useless when it comes to walking about, highly uncomfortable, or just not moi.

This time I'm laying down the law - throwing down the gauntlet - when I pack my bags. Challenge accepted; but possibly already failed. The clothes I never throw on are staying at home in the trailer park, while the garments I wear and worship are travelling with me/on me to America, land of the supersized brave and free.

On the whole, I am all for stereotyping and labeling stuff. Stereotyping may hurt people's ideal world views at times, but gosh darn it, they generally always have an element of truth to them and make identification easier and more convenient for everyone else. Viva la pigeonholing. Having said that, I really don't care for the labeling going on in the fashion industry.

I bought some shorts today that are entirely suitable for hanging around Waikiki beach. Yes they are. But the fashion industry has labelled them mix and match sleep wear separates, like I’m supposed to sleep in them or something.

So now the self-determination of my little shorts is tarnished, through the attachment of one little label. Which I cut off. No-one, but no-one, will take away my shorts liberty and freedom. I have no intention of sleeping in them, but every intention of wearing them on the beach. Take that, fashion industry biatches.

Debby does Orlando

I do believe that this post is just another in a long line of hurricane-related blitherings on my part, or a conga line of suck holes, as Australian politician Mark Latham so eloquently put it. I’m pretty sure Latham was referring to the temperament of major storm cells during hurricane season. I suppose I have been a little preoccupied with the almighty weather surges of late.

I guess it might have something to do with the fact that my travel agent told me months ago that "Orlando doesn't get hurricanes", and I recklessly believed her, and now Hurricane Debby is having her way with Florida, and heading towards Orlando, just weeks before I fly over there.  As long as the tempestuous little minx doesn't start doing Disney.

I was told that this time of the year is called "Hurricane Season". It turns out that "Hurricane Season" means a season of big arse hurricanes. I really wish they would be clearer about these things and not provide me with wishy-washy jargon like "Hurricane Season". I'm sure this climatic mumbo jumbo will catch a lot of other people out too. I guess they are up to D, so only another 822 hurricanes to go.

I am always excited about travelling abroad - 16 SLEEPS! - but equally as thrilled about skipping a month of the hostile, glacial season in Canberra.  I despise the cold, more and more every year.  "The weather's not that bad. It'll get better", someone said to me today.  Okay, great. Well right now it sucks. So unless you can make it better now, keep your irritating optimism to yourself.

I'm heading into a violent hurricane season just so I can avoid the arse-end of Canberra's big freeze, where I might get sucked into a spirally whirly thing made of precipitation and cows and suffer some catastrophic injury to my lumbar area when I’m tossed carelessly into a rural farmhouse and then develop some rare, untreatable type of staph infection, so don't tell me it's not that bad.

Zombies, hurricanes, aeroplanes

It's perfectly natural to feel some degree of anxiety before one goes a'travellin on a jet plane. Perfectly normal. I don't get angst from the thought of flying on a plane, although I am prone to a touch of claustrophobia, and I am not especially stressed over having to spend 24 hours hanging out in airports - or Dante's fifth ring of hell as they are commonly referred.

But I am a little uneasy about visiting a place that has a hurricane season. Not the odd tempest; a hurricane season. Florida started its hurricane season three weeks ago and is already racking up the major storm cells - number four, Tropical Cyclone Debby, is doing Flo Rida at the moment.

Florida is one of the prime targets during the Atlantic hurricane season, and is also the holy mothership of big, scary roller coasters.

On the rare occasions when the current nanny state Australian Government isn't telling me what not to view on the interwebs, what I shouldn't eat for breakfast or otherwise intruding into my personal space and business, they are bleating and harping on about not mixing these two things together. If I had a dollar for every time they told me not to ride a roller coaster in a hurricane blah blah blah. W’ever.

But what the hey, I'm gonna do it, because I'm on holidays. I'm sure the locals know what they're doing. Even though most Floridians are probably of the opinion that space aliens are sending coded messages through their fillings, I'm just going to trust that their roller coasters have been grounded.

Apart from the hurricanes, everyone has been warning me to be careful of the lightning. Um, okay. I'll make sure I do that, as opposed to my usual habit of leaning on tall, pointy, metal structures during a violent storm.  And then there are all the face-eating zombie attacks that have been occurring in Florida lately.  Zombies, hurricanes, lightning - I don't know how to pack for any of these occasions, and Smart Traveller is fairly useless for information on anything other than things that explode or pick-your-pocket.

I'll be spending a couple of weeks near Orlando, in Downtown Disney, which is pretty darn ginormous. There are around 20 major hotels in the "complex", each with a few thousand Mickey Mouse themed boudoirs, so Disney need to shuffle around a minimum of 20,000 people all day, every day, via their magical little carpet ride shuttle buses. It’s like rearranging a couple of suburbs worth of tourists, each of who don’t have a car or a clue.

People often ask me how I am going to cope with the crowds and the noise and the mouse ears everywhere at Disney World. Well Disney are in fact quite exceptional at crowd control. They have to be. They can't have any off days. If you are a mad crowd control enthusiast or revel in all manner of organisation, regulation, neatness and order then go to a Disney theme park.

And they also excel in a quite excellent way at time management. I imagine a key requisite to getting a gig with Disney is the ability to tell the time in a timely fashion, as well as the obligatory infectious good nature. Even at 11pm.  Even in the presence of ghastly tourists.  Rules me out then.

Flo Rida, Why Kiki and Concrete Jungles

I suspect this post is going to be another pointless meandering journey through the disturbing reaches of my psyche.  Sucks to be you. Freud would pee his pants with excitement if he were alive in the era of the blogosphere.

It’s totally bollocks being the last person to know information. It doesn't happy very often, due to my incessant need to stick my nose into everything, mainly specialising in matters that are absolutely none of my beeswax. Nevertheless, I learnt something today that I did not know, and now I feel cheated, indignant, hoodwinked, a fool, and comparatively old in a youthful-looking type of way.

So, here it is. Pay attention. Apparently the rapper Flo Rida named himself after Florida, the place, where he’s from, down in the hood. Am I the only person in the whole entire human race of the planet of earth who did not know this? Now it's just going to be awkward when I go there because I can’t help but call it Flo Rida.

Great. There’s probably a popstar out there in popworld called Ha Why as well. And a songstress temptress called Why KiKi. I wish I could understand Flo Rida’s lyrics, but I guess I’m not conversant enough in Renaissance rap literature. Plus I didn’t grow up in Flo Rida.

I’ve been doing lots of sit-ups and so forth in preparation for my American adventures on the sandy, white beaches of Waikiki and Manhattan. I’ve never been to New York, so if you have something to disclose about that can you please keep it to yourself because concrete jungles are where dreams are made, apparently, and if they don’t have a beach amongst all that concrete then I’m going to be totes CAPSLOCK SAD FACE.

And I imagine the streets won’t make me feel brand new because they are made of fucking cement and it’s going to be a tad hot and humid so you do the math. Those streets will cause hydrogen fusion before they make me feel brand new.

And contrary to all the terrifically constructive / destructive advice in fashion and beauty magazines, doing a couple of sit-ups doesn’t equal a flat stomach. At least not when you’re my age (um, let’s call it 25 and leave it alone).

Back in the day I could do about 100 sit-ups every night for a week and come out all washboardy, flat as an ironing board, flat as a tack, flat as a floorboard, flat like numerous other flat type surfaces. Now it’s just hard work, for months and months and months and nothing changes. I hate getting old. It totally sucks.

Unhappily Ever Colder and Colder

In a mere few weeks I will blow this popsicle stand and go somewhere considerably warmer, and far more humider.  Canberra is a bit popsiclised at the moment, thanks to that dreary meh season that it likes to melodramatically thrust upon its inhabitants.  A+, Canberra, for your winter skills this season.  You've been practicing over summer, haven't you?

I'm soon to travel to Florida's Disney World, where the men are mice, and the mice are human sized men.  Or something.  It's a wonderful world of make believe, where ridonkulous, impractical fairy tale fantasies are shoved into the minds and down the throats of innocent children, who are oblivious to the fact that they will never, ever be a fairy princess when they grow up.  Princess Fiona maybe.

Unless of course their mother stalks a prince throughout their offspring's teen years and then surreptitiously enrols them in the same university class so the young lass can work her magical social climbing powers of persuasion on the young royal. And then she will be given a fancy schmancy title and live happily ever after with her prince at Kensington Palace and wear Princess Diana's ring until the day she dies. The end.

So, back to me. I'm considering applying for climate asylum, putting in a claim to be sent to warmer climes because, you know,  I'm fucking cold and miserable here.  People from 'stan countries definitely don't know what it's like to freeze their grandes balles off.

Don't get all politically correct and rant about my rudeness and insensitivity in comparing my situation to that of a political refugee. Because only the nations that offer cradle to grave welfare are acceptable to them.

There are a bunch of other countries that they could stop at on the way here.  But, yes, Australia is better than them all.  Not different; better.  Just ask the refugees, because they all want to live in Australia.

I too have a lengthy list of nation states where I don't want to go, which also starts and finishes with every muslim country in the entire universe, due to the political heat and also the actual heat.  No-one in their right mind wants to live in Middle Earth, which is why they all flee to the west.  Middle Earth, Middle East, same thing.

So it seems to me that instead of intervening in Middle Earth affairs, like the west has be doing for ever, we should just raze the darn place, build a new Middle Earth, call it something a bit cooler, like the United States of America No. 2, democratise the shit out of it, build a couple of McDonalds, and then the crisis would be resolved. 

The side effects of this plan are a land of spoilt Kardashianesque morons, but at least no-one would blow your hair extensions off when you walked down the street. On a side note, why and how does Kim Kardashian have 15 million twits following her on social media? I cannot even comprehend how this has happened.  I guess she is quite excellent at giving off the allure of being relevant.  Kudos.

Ruinous Rats and Drowning Swimmers

It seems the long-awaited (in that we've been waiting eons and eons) NBN rollout is been sabotaged by jaded and ravenous rats in Darling Downs.  I have no idea where Darling Downs is, nor do I especially care, but I assume it is in some inaccessible part of Australia where the NBN will fail to work properly anyway.

I think perhaps the Gillard Government could provide a rat welfare program for vermin that are just scraping by on the poverty line. Or at the very least allow them to dodge filing a tax return in 2012-13.

Perhaps the government could also administer some type of rat fulfilment scheme, where rat youth could while away their days playing free pokies and developing an alcohol or nicotine addiction rather than spending their time destroying the somewhat futile government infrastructure. There is no evidence that I know of that suggests rats suffer from gambling dependence, so I'm sure a program of this nature has some legs.

Speaking of rats, two swimmers that were chosen for the Australian Olympic team are watching their careers go down the gurgler. The two boys - I don't know their names, and don't really care, and couldn't really be bothered Googling them or reading their names in the attached article to find out - that will carve up the dirty, grubby, swampy Thames during the Games in London in July have found themselves in sticky festering septic water again, thanks to the fact that they are both total dickheads.

I think one of them broke someone's jaw once and the other lied about something or something. It seems to me that if the people who pay for your togs and your jetsetting around the globe already hate you it is perhaps best to not give them any more ammunition, like access to photos on Twitter of you posing with guns and ammunition. 

But the boys did just that, most likely because they are not terribly smart; I suppose you don't have to be to pursue a black line up and down a pool. I expect the left wing media and Swimming Australia wouldn't have blinked an eyelid if the boys had been embracing a javelin, for example, which is, however, also a nifty weapon to be clutching if you are suddenly overtaken with the psychotic predisposition.

But guns, woah, guns are dangerous. Leftwingers (ie. much of the media) are terrified of guns.  They start  hyperventilating when anyone holds a gun: "Aghhh! It's a serial killer! We're all gonna die!"  It really is anyone's guess why they allow coverage of the swimming at the Olympics in that case, because kids drown in pools all the time. And doing backflips on a thin mattress and coining it gymnastics isn't the best idea for your posture.  And sprinting over hurdles is just a wacky brainchild.

I am going to Florida shortly, home sweet home of redneck alligators and Disney World, and I think it is an ideal location and an opportune time for me to buy a handgun. Just because you can.  I don't mean at Disney*, I mean at Wallmart. I’ve always wanted to go to Wallmart. 

And then I can post some snaps on Facebook with my new toy. One of my favourite pastimes is watching leftwingers get so agitated that their heads spin around until they explode, so what better grounds do I need?  And then I could get labelled a pro-gun extremist - ie, the Age's name for anyone who disagrees with the Age on gun control.

Anti-gun groups and the nutty left wing media windbags start screaming like banshees about banning guns altogether whenever they hear the word. They seem to think the crime rate would simply disappear if guns didn’t exist. The assumption that everyone would start shooting everyone if everyone had a gun is absurd. And the assumption that criminals would forget about murdering, raping and pillaging society if there were no guns is also idiotic.

The left wing media should be targeting Federal judges, who often release serious criminals back onto the streets, believing they can be rehabilitated. They believe murderers are basically good people except for their tendency to sometimes kill people.

* Just kidding Disney.  Why would you sell handguns? What I mean is please don't sue me.

Keep Calm and Carillon On

I went to Canberra's sickeningly photogenic Lake Burley Griffin this morning at the crack of -3 degrees to watch the Trooping the Queen's Colour, so I was a happy-go-lucky ray of fucking sunshine. 

Back in the day, colours were paraded before regiments so troops knew their team colours, as it is always quite useful to know which side you're on and which direction to point your gun.  But it's all just for pomp and pageantry purposes these days. 

In this ceremony, the Royal Military College Duntroon get their cadets to prance up and down and up and down a parade ground in their spiffy whiter than white jackets, licquorice allsort trouser pants, sheeny shoes and various shining accoutrements, while being yelled at by a loud-mouthed, order-barking field officer with a penchant for being loud-mouthed in a spectacularly loud-mouthed fashion.  And at some point in the event the colours are tossed around carelessly like a pass-the-parcel.  Sort of, but not really like that at all.    

I have attended several of these ceremonies.  I don't know why.  Nothing ever changes; the military like to maintain order and precision in everything they do.  And they also don't care much for spontaneity or surprises.  There is always a lot of choreographed marching and people yelling and shiny shoes and lots of standing around; by the poor cadets and by me. 

One can generally seat one's bottom at these things, but today I stood, right up the front, because I wanted to take some snaps without big boofheads blocking my way.

Due to the fact that I am utterly incapable of standing still for five minutes, I spent much of the time swaying and sighing and stamping my feet to the beat and occasionally I did cartwheels around the grass in a mostly choreographed fashion, but the cadets never moved a muscle, unless Officer Yells-A-Lot yelled at them to do so.  They never do.

Standing still is a discipline that anyone can learn, I imagine, except for me, time and flies.  Speaking of time; it does not fly when one has to stand still.  I guess I keep going back in the hope that one day one of them will go rogue and start moonwalking during the Symbolic Arrival of HM the Queen.  I'm sure no-one would notice a spot of freestyling.

Stuff I learnt today.  Canberrans, did you know that the Carillion is not actually called the Carillion?  It's the Carill-on.  I know, right!  The last time I was this confused was when I was told there was no Santa Claus. 

I really can't cope with this ridiculous piece of information right now, as it completely screws with my national landmark thought processes, so I will continue to call it the Car-ill-ion.  Probably forever. 

More stuff I learnt today.  There is a fine line between surreptitiously responding to a mobile text over and over and over again and being a rude dickhead.  I have decided to erase this line.  I am putting all these people into the same impertinent boat and then chucking them overboard.  Every man, woman and precocious child; I don't care how short you are. 

When I looked around at the crowd this morning, I noted a high number of mostly young people glued to their mobile phones - texting, sexting, but mostly being perplexing - to their smarter friends, who were likely still in bed. 

To these people who will apparently spontaenously be consumed by fire if they don't access their mobile phone every five damn seconds I say this: fuck off and stop being so damn disrespectful.  Maybe it was a Groupthink thing.  You can never underestimate the power of stupid people when they assemble.  Never.

Royals, Ears and Vertigo

It's been a wee week since I blogged about all the trivial, superficial stuff that happens in my life, or the general vicissitudes of being remarkable in a world replete with commonfolk, or the fools that cross my path on a daily basis, exposing me to their veggie garden variety trashbagness.

To be honest, I think the only explanation for the way the interweb blogosphere has been able to cope with my lack of prose is the blanket media coverage given to the Annus Diamondus Jubilius celebratus. Well, no need to fret any longer.

I don't have anything even vaguely fascinating to write about, but that never stopped me creating this blog thing in the first place, in the hopes that it might be mistaken for some type of scholary work.  I just make it up as I go along, as they used to say at NASA's Mission Control Centre.  Speaking of  NASA, I will be visting them very shortly.  Oh wait, the Obama Messiah got rid of it... That is a bloody bummer.

I'm not counting but my anti-winter, pro-summer holiday is possibly a mere 36 days away. I may or may not be going up to the moon on a turbo-charged space jet plane from Cape Canaveral.  It's going to be quite the expaarrience, although it's all a bit to be advised at the moment.

Speaking of jet planes, I very recently took one to sunny, warm Brissie, completely forgetting that the last time I flew a small distance on a jet plane I discovered that I have a Eustachean Tube Dysfunction.  I can't be arsed explaining it again on here, but it's all to do with stupid ears and air pressure and flying and what not. Suffice to say, I now have stupid vertigo. 

Admittedly, it is the cool type of stupid vertigo, involving the sensation of riding massive ocean swells and roller coasters - like the ones that have screamin' and thunder and death machine in their name, rather than the type of vertigo that gives rise to spinning, nausea and vomiting.  Last time it only lasted a few days, so I will use this time wisely to prep for Disney World, whose rides are more expensive and less fun than my vertigo adventures.  

It's all very exciting, bobbing up and down on a virtual ocean while sitting at your desk at work, gripping anything and everything on the white-knuckle ride into pseudo-LSD weirdness, but it is a tad awkward and embarrassing when one has to hold onto filing cabinets while walking down the corridor, mumbling that the ground is kind of rolling and the walls are sort of bouncing about and so forth.  It was all great fun.

That is all. Good day.

Note to self: Best not go to the gym when you have vertigo. It is a bit of a VBI (Very Bad Idea)