Life in the Right Brain

If you go for the broad generalisations made in popular psychology on brain hemispheres - the logical left and the creative right - my right hemisphere definitely gets a fair shake of the sauce bottle in my various leisurely pursuits.

In fact, sometimes when I'm creative writing I have to slice it open and scoop out the rest of the sauce because the sauce shop is closed and I need more sauce.  And sometimes one also just wants to paint with acrylics apparently.

I bought such paints about ten years ago and opened them recently because I was unwell and also bored.  I painted Ms Blake Lively because I needed a humanoid's face and she was on the cover of the Vogue I dragged out of the neighbours trash (I'm classy).

I've given poor Blake a bad nose job and a terrible hair do but that's postmodern art for you.  It certainly doesn't stop millions of postmodernists painting crap and popping it on the walls of London's Tate Modern. Clear a spot on your walls, Tate! Here's another piece of shit.

Deep fried retinas

I'll try and break your
retinas, but I'm pretty.

The other day I caught sight of one of those online news photo albums that told me the 25 best places in the world to watch the sunset or something. I was actually looking for a particular news article on the terrorist group, ISIL, but I got distracted by the fucking sunsets.

You go looking for something particular on the world wide webs and then you realise that time has no meaning and you are trapped in an endless loop of fucking sunsets and your brain spins out of control and then the top of your head explodes.  And that usually means you fail to enjoy the rest of your day or the sunset.

So, sunsets.  Pretty, idyllic, the romanticism of it all, yes, yes, but also staring at the sun tends to make you blind, so there's that.  Watching the daily disappearance of the big bright yellow thing into the horizon from a pretty place is supposedly something you are required to do, or you are missing out. YOLO, and all that.

So apparently it's fine to watch the sun set, but staring directly at the sun anytime before sunset can permanently scar your retinas, the area at the back of your eye that is responsible for, you know, vision.  And that would be a regretability.

I'll try and burn your eyeballs out.

Don't look at the sun or you'll go blind.  Aww, it's sunset, everyone look at the sunset.  Big mobs of mixed messages. Life is so confusing sometimes.

The sun doesn't really do close ups, does it? It does its best work, is at its most photogenic - its most photosynthetic? - as a sunset. It's all real pretty and you'll fall in love with it instantly in a serious way until it gets up into your face, and then it's all scary gases and fire and brimstone and 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Copernicus also overanalysed the sunset. He was the bloke who stared at it for so long that it eventually dawned on him that the sun wasn't moving at all; we were. And then he went with blind in all of his eyes so that wasn't so great for him.

Apparently the sunlight is very dim at sunset compared to the sunlight at noon so does little damage to your eyes, but why ruin a good yarn.

One flew over the cuckoo's nest

One flew over the cuckoo's nest the other day. That is, Northern Iraq. At least it said so on my onboard flight plan. I was quite chuffed that I was still onboard after flying over Northern Iraq, what with the new war there and everything. I have no idea why Etihad chooses to fly over war zones. Who knows the ways of pilots.

Perhaps if Etihad could perhaps take somewhat less than an hour and a half to load passengers into their tiny seats they wouldn't have to make up time by flying the most direct route over war zones and thus would not need to dehydrate their passengers by flying at 38,000 feet. Just some thoughts for them to ponder.

Looking down, I didn't hate Iraq immediately, which is as much as you could hope for the place. Despite its notoriety, despite its danger, despite its... endlessness, Iraq looks quite beautiful from the air, which is my first and only choice of location for tourism of this region.

From 38,000 feet, around 11.5 kilometres, Iraq resembles a big piece of brown paper that has been scrunched and flattened again. It's a crumpled, arid landscape for miles and miles.

While steadfastly gazing at the barrenness below and at the other jumbos cruising past towards the direction we were coming from I notice a gigantic, jagged mountain capped in snow in the distance, in the middle of the desert.

A snow capped monster in the middle of the desert.  Looked mighty majestic rising up through the clouds. Pretty amazing if you care to think about it.

Turns out it was Mount Ararat in Turkey, one of two in the Mountains of Ararat. It is the place named in the Book of Genesis where Noah's Ark came to rest after the great flood. Noted.

I worked out on Googy Maps that I saw this mountainous stunner from approximately 300-400 kilometres away. It rises nearly 18,000 feet and seems to be located in the very definition of absolutely fucking nowhere.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the mountains were jagged, brown and dusty. While the whole region looks so remote, and it is, nearly every impossibly high mountain range has a tiny village set into its crater or summit, with what looks like a dirt track down the mountain to another slightly larger village at the bottom.

The ones at the bottom have strips of green running through them, and the slightly bigger villages are encircled with a tinge of green.

Fascinating how farmers can irrigate and grow crops and supply for the villages, with some encompassing huge swathes of land.  Sometimes it's good to stop watching House of Cards for a moment and just look out the window.

England's Moronways

I've been cruising the petunia-ridden streets of Englandshire for the past five weeks. It's been great craic, but I'm getting a little weary of cathedrals, castles, palaces and other outstanding old shit. Plus the motorways drive me bat shit crazy. 

So thoughtful of them to put Stonehenge right on the A343.

My exact problem in travelling around Englandworld is that to see A, you must first traverse B.  'A' being some type of exceptional landmark and 'B' being having to drive/take transport to get there. 

And 'B' is mostly just different levels of exasperating, but that's what you get when you pop 60 million lads and folk into a can of spam and label it England. 

I'm sure the English are just doing the best they can with the archaic potholes surrounded by the occasional stretch of flat asphalt that they have been equipped with and for some inexplicable reason call 'roads', but they certainly don't put on a friendly reception to visitors.

People are doing the best they can, said Deepak Chopra. Plus, people are massive idiots, said me. They try to obliterate anything in their path with their heat seeking BMWs, and that's just not cricket.

Not much of a hedge fan.

There are no speed limits on the moronways.  There seems to be a wide range of speed options available on various signposts along the way but these are rarely adhered to, and only at one's discretion.

I believe the object of the race is to double the number you see on the signpost on the side of the racetrack, times it by your favourite number and that will provide you with an appropriate rate of motion for the conditions presented to you.

It would be fine if any of them knew how to drive, park, indicate, merge, overtake, reverse or drive like a fucking normal person, but, alas.

To their credit, the British don't beep their horn at you, no matter what you do to them. Because they're British, and beeping would be terribly impolite. They'll annihilate your car to a diesely pile of rubble, but they are well mannered enough to not beep.

Gloucestershire Sheen

Took a day trip to Gloucestershire today, and tripped over several of its famed Cotswold villages. The tripping was actually quite deliberate, but it still hurts to stub your toe on all that stonework.

Went to Stow on the Wold, Bourton on the Water, the Slaughters (Upper and Lower), Pastrami on Rye, Cheese on the Mold. It was all quite fabulous.

The Cotswolds are in Gloucestershire in England.  You wanna know how many times I've used the word "quaint" in the past few days? This place is so darn quaint I can barely stand it. The english countryside is so pleasingly old fashioned. Although, after a while the cutesy and quaintsy kind of becomes a little claustrophobicy.

Have just popped down the countryside to Bath, which is located in beautiful county Somerset. Bath is a lovely region, but Hitler didn't care about pretty villages replete with petunias. As such, it was bombed quite badly during the war.

I wanted to read a book, The Bath Blitz, before I came to Bath, but I didn't get around to it. It is an account of the 1942 bombings, Hitler's revenge for the British attacking Baltic cities.

Checked into the Best Western Centurion Hotel on the outskirts of the city, which is surprisingly deplete of ancient roman soldiers.  There was one guy checking in at reception, but maybe that's just the way they dress around here.  Who am I to judge, I'm wearing a tartan pant suit.

As far as woop-woop goes, this hotel is definitely in it.  But fortunately we are travelling with Ailish, our Irish navigatory machine, and Merv, our Mercedes Benz hire car, so all is well.

WAGs Palace - Hampton Court

Actually though, can I live here please.

This touristy business is very exhausting. As much as I love to move about, away from the ordinary everyday, I also would love to sleep in my own bed every night. But moving around is how tourism works I'm pretty sure. But you know who else was notorious for not wanting to sleep in his own bed every night? King Henry VIII. Which, in my opinion, wasn't an accident.

I hit up his mansion yesterday -  Hampton Court Palace  - famous for being home away from his 59 other homes and his six WAGs, before he killed half of them because they refused to watch Coronation Street with him.  

The WAG Palace is located on the outskirts of London town in Richmond upon Thames, just a train hop away from central London. I stormed through the gates of the mansion uninvited, in what can only be described as in an aggressive manner, because that's how HVIII would have rolled. He wasn't the kind of man who would calmly walk through a door no matter what.

The King looked a lot like my Uncle Frank, who would not be seen dead in woolen tights, tunics, or pointy elf shoes I am fairly certain, which sounds jarringly like a detail you didn't need to know.

The type of man who won't
undo his top button 

The WAG palace is pleasant enough I suppose, in an understated, restrained Tudor type of way, although it is replete with great ornate ceilings which is most definitely a recipe for disaster. Let's just pause for the poor damn cleaner who has been dusting them every week for the last 500 years...

But not even the grand old King of England had nice loot in the 16th century; it was all muted reds and browns.  Or maybe he just preferred simplicity in his furnishings, and kept complexity for his privy relations; trying to keep the WAGs away from each other sounds much like a fulltime job.

The WAG palace certainly doesn't have the grandeur of Windsor Palace, Buckingham Palace, or Alnwick Castle (yes, the Harry Potter one), all fancy establishments I have traipsed through in recent weeks, but I can tell it has drama but also secrets.

The gardens of the WAG palace are beautiful and expansive, as you'd expect from a monarch who reigned before the global financial crisis and Instagram, when people who lived off the public purse didn't pretend to care if they looked wealthy or ostentatious.

I love England. Look at it.

Although I suppose the King looking strong and powerful could be crucial in retaining the empire. Plus, you didn't want some French upstart with a trim girth stealing your monarch moment.

King Henry of the WAGs was a cad, but probably only engaged in behaviour that was expected of him throughout that whole unpleasant era.  His whole palace reminds me a bit of Kayne West, which is a regretability.

He went through multiple WAGs in his quest to produce a male heir and had a few of his exes beheaded - more angrily than was necessary - in his special beheading room, which he later turned into a trophy room with a pool table.  I imagine each of them almost immediately regretted their nuptials.

Two of his conquests, Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard, were in fact murdered in the Tower of London, which is another delightful yet disturbing place to visit full of death and torture but also secrets.

I love England, but the more time I spend here the more I am thankful that I was born in the 20th century.

Mind the Tourist.

Before arriving in London, the delightful capital of my mother country by another mother, one believes one would have benefited from a spot of boot camp, perhaps a style similar to that administered to London's Metropolitan Icecream Police force, to prepare oneself for the discipline and endurance necessary to tackle the crap out of London in summer.

A key part of the lean machine that is London is the underground, or the Tube, as it is affectionately known by those who can find affection for such things as infrastructure. Found deep under the earth, the cheerfully bright red and blue primary colours throughout the city denoting a station crypt below belie its cruel nature.

The Tube can eat you alive if you are daft enough to approach it during peak hour.  I imagine one's initial experience of the peak hour tube monster is akin to some tourists first experience of Bondi Beach.

Despite all the warnings they go out swimming, get caught in the rip and before they know it they have ended up in a place they don't want to be, ie. Brixton. No-one wants that.

The Tube map is the only colourful object to view in London. Despite its glossy appearance and 'I've been vomited on by a unicorn' facade, a sighting of the familiar map across a tube station crowded with deatheaters is a godsend for the many lost tourists who have their happy thoughts sucked out on the Picadilly line.  Although the rainbow-inspired transport bible often creates more confusion than anything else.

During the peak hour brouhaha, you have a split second to choose a tube line and a direction of where you want to end up, because the locals take no prisoners.

For some unfathomable reason, at any time of the day, everyone is in a big bloody rush. Must get somewhere urgently for some unknown reason. And you get dragged into their crazy shit, into the rip of all these commuters, because they want to get home and watch Corrie (Coronation Street; they love it) or get into the queue for the Eye, for the privilege of looking at dirty, grimy London from a different angle.

Eastbound, westbound, red line, yellow line, blue line, black line with purple squiggles, exit here, exit there, stairs, lifts, escalators, more bloody stairs, people using the long white corridors to tune their guitars and voices. They may be on vacation, but tourists are in pain.

London visitors have some of the more pronounced 'tourist face' that I have seen. Much like zombie face, 'tourist face' is not terribly different to the undead. Nothings elicits tourist face quicker than walking around out-of-towner-infused London for a few long hours engaged in typical activities like walking for fucking miles, and such.

Wide eyes, droopy open mouth, feet a draggin', a soft moan can be heard when a staircase of two steps appears before them, avoids sitting on the Tube because it will make it that little bit harder to mind the gap at the end of their journey. All symptomatic of tourist face.

Next time you see a 'tourist face', give them some pennies in empathy of their cause, because nothing cheers up tourists more than fucking pennies, what with their brassiness and usefulness.

Tourism is hard yakka.

Just spent a solid 5 days sightseeing in and around gorgeous London. You can't go a metre in this town without tripping over a crypt of a famous dead guy - literally, in the case of Westminster Abbey - or a South American school group - literally anywhere interesting in London.

I've been starting the day with a Starbucks latte (desperate times and measures) and seemingly the promise of a day filled wth more of the blue stuff and bright yellow thing in the sky.

First things first, which is how first things often works. Today began with a smooth cruise down the Thames, from Westminster to the Tower Bridge, catching the sights of landmarks such as the Shard, the Gherkin, the walkie talkie, distant views of stunning St Paul's and the Tower of London, the latter of which is the only interesting thing down river of Westminster. The rest of the junk on the banks of the Thames looks like it's competing in an ugly building competition.

After spending 20 minutes looking for a loo, we went back up river via the cruise boat and hit the mean streets of the City of Westminster that accommodate the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and pesky pickpocketers.

As is often the case, I was in no mood for pickpocketers. To this end, I hatched a plan to behead anyone who dared bump into me with a plastic fork, part of my three pronged approach - the others being salt and pepper -  in the case of a salad emergency.

Turns out it's a bit difficult to make your way through the moneyshot areas of Westminster without being pushed, prodded, and dragged along with the tourist tide. Yep, Westminster has a rip.

We then popped into the very beautiful Westminster Abbey, the famous 10th century gothic church, to undergo the obligatory tour, which was easy on the London Pass because your fast pass entry guarantees that you don't have to queue with the peasants, and you get a free crypt if you spend more than 100 quid in the giftshop.

The Abbey is where Wills and Kate married in 2011 in an intimate ceremony in front of two billion of their closest friends and family.

Despite the enormity of its ceilings, it actually does feel quite intimate inside.  I didn't realise that the far end of the Abbey is essentially a cemetery, housing the crypts of Henry V, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and many famous poets and writers. So fabulously creepy.

That section of the Abbey sort of resembles one of those TV shows about hoarding, where the occupant can't move in their house without walking into a pile of newspapers or stubbing their toe on the crypt of a dead monarch. And most of them are wearing their "death masks", because that's not creepy at all.

London may not look big on the coffee stained tourist pocket map but it's a bit of a hike to get to the places the tourists congregate, ie the pretty places with oodles of history attached to them.

Not blogging much this trip. Too tired. Tourism is hard. Poor me. I have thoughts and opinions on the Tube, so maybe tomorrow I will catalogue such rivetting things here.

One's coinage.

Her Maj the Queen has recently named the UK's largest ever warship, an aircraft carrier, after herself.  Naturally. Lucky she's not called Barry.

We Elizabeth's do insist that nearly everything in the Commonwealth world is named after ourselves, thus ensuring our name is written in the universe more times than Coca-Cola. You name it, we coin it, so to speak.

To this end, technically all coinage that exists in the Commonwealth belong to people called Elizabeth. One should engage in a class action to retrieve one's loot.  

One is also rather entertained when people with odd sounding names get all excited on seeing their crazy name on a mug in a cheap and tacky souvenir shop.  I guess that's what you get when you call yourself Krystyna or Jyssyca.

I've recently learnt that, during the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the tower that houses the Big Ben bell was renamed Elizabeth Tower. See what I mean. Everything must be named after us. It's the rules.

50 Shades of Green

As enticing as the title may sound, this post is not a saucy ebook about leprachaun relations. This is not that sort of blog. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Since arriving in Dublin five days ago we have had superb sunshine. I don't understand it either. It's very unIrish. But fortunately for me, I kept my weather expectations very low for my big trip to this region.

I had been warned about Ireland. You'll fall in love with it immediately in a very serious way.

You'll also be met at the airport by a leprachaun who speaks Martian (Gaelic, same thing) who drives you into the city through wild paddocks and forces you to down 24 Guinesses and then brands you on your forehead with a shamrock and crossbones. And then you have to check-in to your hotel drunk with this thing on your head.

Before coming to Ireland, most of what I knew came from cliches and 'an englishman, welshman and irishman walk into a pub' jokes.

Here's the deal about this place. It's such a cute little ditty. It is not naturally possible for the scenery to get any more lovely. The greenest green, 50 shades of leprachaun green, which is painstakingly borne out of torrential rain for nearly every day of the year. Except, surprisingly, when I've been here. It did rain yesterday but we were up in the hills, watching the leprachauns play with cows and goats. It happened.

The average summer temperature across Ireland is between 19-21 degrees celsius, which is hugely depressing. It's total blarney. I don't know any Aussies who could or would put up with that. No wonder the Irish spend their days in pubs scoffing Guinness.

We started our journey with 2 nights in Dublin at a quaint hotel in the city near the Christchurch Cathedral. Dublin is a vibrant, chaotic city, sort of a western version of New Delhi.

No-one can drive, the cyclists are nuts; they don't wear helmets and careen down the roads in between buses and cars. I'm all for sharing the road but it's probably a good idea to wear some sort of brain protection given that the car insurance industry is backed by the mantra that accidents happen.

Sleep time. I think I'll pen more tomorrow...

Gulf heat - Abu Dhabi in July

Having recently spent about 20 hours in an Abu Dhabian summer I can safely say this; I would never, ever live there. Not even an expensive arab gold bullion would tempt me.

Abu Dhabi is conveniently located in the fucking desert. Which is great if you are a camel or a cactus, but not so great if your skin melts off your skin like a golden gaytime. Speaking of gay times, I didn't really have one of those in my 20 hours.

The heat and humidity rudely hits you in the face about 8 o'clock in the morning as you are chauffered to your hotel. The heat is pure oppression.

Abu Dhabi is a ghost town in July which is probably due to Ramadan - no drinking, eating or fun having before sunset. It's probably also due to the fact that it's fucking hot, as I mentioned. I will mention it again because it is the defining feature of that little town.

When I say little, I mean extreme and over the top, as if the world's richest men were given a brief to compete with each other to build the biggest, weirdest, least pratical concrete structures they could come up with.

There is a permanent purpose built Formula One track. Whole complete grandstands built for one weekend a year where the desert town hosts Bernie Ecclestone and his racy mates.

One massive ugly building competition. You win, Abu Dhabi.

Early bird catches the plane

It's half past too fucking early in the morning. Do you know who's up at this hour? Worms, birds and those bloody annoying morning people.

I'm at a crowded but not so rowdy Abu Dhabi International Airport and I'm not especially happy about it. I'm waiting for things to happen. Specifically, in no particular order, I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for my flight to Ireland Land, my quadruple shot half strength cappucino to cool and my body to escalate my building fatigue into a cranky coma.

Must stay awake. Is carrying limp bodies onto planes part of the role of the long-suffering boarding staff? I would be devastated if I felled into sleep and missed all the interesting things that happen at airports in the middle of the fucking night.

Left Arm Training Academy

I've recently hurt my right shoulder in a way that is quite painful and exceedingly annoying.  A tear, bursitis, tendinitis, probably also appendicitis and definitely something else that I can't remember but causes me much crankiness and throbbiness.

I've been reluctant to take painkillers in case they do their job properly and kill the pain and I damage the stupid limb more than it already has been.  

In fact, I'm so hard core that I'm practically Jack Bauer, except without the annoyingly quiet whispery voice or the cool reputation.  And I don't generally pack heat when I go to my day job.

Although, as of the last few hours, I've been crunching down anti-inflammatories as if they were candy crush.

Add caption

I hurt my arm while out on a run up a mountain.  I slipped, fell on my arse and my stupid right limb pointlessly tried to save me from the mud and screwed itself in the process.  

So, in the absence of a working arm, I'm currently trying to train my left arm to take up some of the slack that my right arm usually has to put up.

Training The Left while The Right ventures reluctantly through the medical system has had its ups and downs.  Mostly downs.  The Left has no fucking idea what it's doing.  

It doesn't know how to open a door, drive a car by itself, open the fridge, a jar, type by itself, and it refuses to lean over and get a shopping centre ticket or swipe in my underground car park, so we all have to get out, much to the annoyance of the humanoids behind me.  I'm thinking of putting an L magnet on my car to indicate to morons that I'm a left-handed driver.

I try to stay away from writing about politics in my bloggeroonies, but, much like political leftists, my left arm is proving to be lazy and incompetent.  Like a leftwing Hollywood movie star, who have so much money they never have to mix with the proletariat scum they claim to champion, there is little point to my left arm.  

I really had no idea it was so damn useless.  It's toying with my will to live or, at the very least, my desire to do anything that requires upper limb activity.

On listening to me whinging about my left arm training academy today, a friend said this to me.  She actually said this: "I regularly train my left arm to do stuff in case I lose the ability in my right arm".  Seriously, what?

While I now sort of understand the plight of left-handers in Western society, fucking please, what is it with left-handers with their need for a special day - International Lefthanders Day?  

Here's an excerpt from Wiki on these oppressed people:

Thousands of left-handed people are discriminated in today's society, are forced to use right handed tools, drive on the right side of the road and even get harassed.  International Lefthanders Day is made to end this discrimination.

I suppose that's true.  But maybe they should regularly train their right arm to operate heavy machinery.  

London not all that old

I'm moving to London soon, because I fancy myself genteel. When I say I'm moving there I mean I am visiting it for a period of one week.

If only people knew how to use phone boxes.

London (or Lun-Den as I call it in a slightly pretentious Oxford accent) fancies itself as the capital of my mother country by another mother, and it is also very old.  That's how the story goes anyway.

If history is merely a cumulative account of all the ways a bunch of dead people have screwed up in the exactly the same ways living people are screwing up London right now, then it's also historical.

London has in fact confirmed that it is not really that old at all, it has just made all of its buildings look vintage and distressed to get a huge slice of the tourist market.

Thus, that whole story about London, or Londinium, being established around AD 43 is really just a bunch of hokum.

While there is much to admire about London during the day and also at night, a lot of it is not vastly improved by daylight.

In London everything is named something improbable or totally inappropriate in the way that only the English manage to get away with - Cockbush Avenue anyone - and the sky is all but permanently the colour of grey slate tiles.  That said, it is also full of delightfully british teatowels, tearooms and teapots, the ambience is mostly agreeable and I just love it to death.

Discontinued Things

Discontinued is one of my dislike words.  I wish people would discontinue using it all the time. Discontinue doesn't even end properly, it just keeps going until it runs out of vowels.  And that's just lazy.

Everyone knows the feeling when one's favourite consumer goods are so-called discontinued.  It feels personal.  As if the stupid big business involved sent their yellow cylindrical minions with their metal eye goggles into your home to trawl through your bathroom and kitchen cabinets looking for products that you clearly appreciate so they can condemn them to product pergatory just to piss you off.

If consumers buy a product by the bucketload apparently the obvious thing to do is discontinue the shit out of it and bring out a similar looking but otherwise inferior product just to screw with their heads. 

I've recently had two of my favourite products discontinued.  A lip gloss and some leg stocking type adornage, both of which I have been buying for years and years and both of which were always so darn popular that I could never find them on the shelves.

You had to be at the right Woolies at the right time to hook in that hosiery in the right size and colour.  A whole lot of star alignment involved. Have you ever tried to wrangle stars?  They just do their own gravity thing.  It's just impossible.

Revlon
Stupid Revlon have relieved me of the burden of having to buy my favourite lip garnish.  Back in the day, before it was discontinued, I liked this smacker so much that I bought five of them in Hawaii a few years ago because the price was a fifth of what they charge in Australia.  Revlon won't ever be anyone anyway.  Not with that attitude.

Wicked
Stockings, hosiery, pantyhose are a constant source of annoyance for all women.  And it's just getting worse because it seems women have lost the attention of manufacturers to the male market.

NFL football players, hunters, men with varicose veins, horseback riders and soldiers have been hogging the attention of manufacturers for years now. Apparently.  I don't have any empirical evidence to back up this claim, I just know it to be true because this person I know has a sister who knows someone who knows Wikipedia.

Speaking of stockings, my favourite brand, Wicked, has been discontinued.  I contacted their parent company, big mumma Pacific Brands, to get the lowdown on why they want to grind the hopes and dreams of my legs into the dirt and almost immediately regretted it.  I spoke to a lady - let's call her Apathy - who appeared quite bored with my annoying customer service dramas.  After enquiring if there was anything else she could do to make my life more wretched she popped me through to Sales.

As expected, Sales were super happy to speak to the general public.  After toying with my will to live Sales advised me to stock up at wholesale prices at voodoofactoryoutlet.com.au.  So I did.  I bought 46 pairs of stockings at wholesale prices.  Thanks Apathy.

A guide to Royal Stalking

Last week I went royal stalking on Prince Will and Duchess Kate's first proper day of being publicly viewed in Canberra, under the guise of being a monarchist.  This is apparently what we people do when there is monarchy in town.

Royal stalking, like any stalking, is really quite hard work.  It requires stamina, persistence, a continued elevated level of interest and lots of elbowing of little old ladies.  I just don't think I'm committed enough to care that much, so it was a lot of hard yakka.

Elbowing little old ladies may seem rather mean spirited to you, but most of them are not really as fragile as they claim to be.  When it comes to the royals, most of these women turn into menacing witches who will dupe you out of a premium spot at any opportunity.  They are tough as nails and know exactly how to worm their way to the front of the crowd by dropping a series of phrases that make you feel like a monster for being younger than them.

It's not my fault that I'm not 862 years old.  I'm so sorry that I wasn't born in the 12th century, but being old doesn't give you a front row seat.  You should have arrived earlier.

I "caught up with" the royals at Canberra's Portrait Gallery, the only place I could be bothered going to.  See, no commitment.  When they did eventually come out of the painted faces place they were greeted by lots of flashing cameras, baby girls with flower posies, big burly security men and the assorted other interesting/uninteresting folk that travel in and/or stalk a royal motorcade.

Kate was wearing a lovely shade of Kermit the Frog green so bright I had to wear my shades.  Fortunately she decided against wearing the bright yellow number she donned on her arrival in Australia that meant everyone had to look directly at the sun.  Bit of a public health nuisance, is the duchess.  I've still got white spots on my eyeballs.  I guess it was fortunate that she didn't wear it in England - it would confuse the hell outta the British.

Top Gun pilot shit

Yesterday I watched some Top Gun, a little known independent flick from the 80s that no-one watched or cared about.  The End.

And after that happened, I watched The Making of Top Gun and I thought to myself, "oh, THAT Top Gun.  I thought they meant the other Top Gun that crashed and burned the first time", or whatever.

Top Gun made Tom Cruise the weirdo he is today.  I suppose his perplexing Scientology interests and holy matrimony to Joey from Dawson's Creek and Nicole Kidman from Australia didn't help much.  Neither did any of the movies he's made since Top Gun.  Days of Thunder was satisfactory I suppose, but only because I feel the need the need for speed.

So The Making of Top Gun was damn fascinating and all, but it was kind of a buzz kill.  It's all aerodynamical nerds with their paper fighter jets and remote control planes.  Since watching it I've figured out that I don't even know what is real anymore.  I mean, does Australia even have a RAAF?

I certainly hope so, because we've coughed up over $12 billion for 72 Joint Strike Fighters.  I don't know all the details, but I believe they will be made of strong cardboard, because we Aussies like to get bang for our buck.

Slippery Slope

I do like to disparage those unfortunates who write about their running escapades on social media, as if their exercise tips, apps, times, routes or injuries mean anything to anyone.  HAVING SAID THAT, this is my blog party and I'll write what I want to, so today's captivating theme is my running shenanigans.

Much like your common mountain goat, I routinely run up a mountain track which, when the skies open up and douse me with haytchtwo-oh, is extremely capable of maiming or causing me enormous amounts of death, or at the very least ruining my enjoyment of each day I continue to do it.

And I feel that it needs to be written about in blogoform in the blogosphere so in centuries to come the denizens of Canberra will know about Asics running shoes and how completely fucking shite they were when it came to slippery, sloppy mountain deathtraps.  I may as well wear skis covered in margarine on my feet for all the benefits they provide in the rain and mud.

I write of this as I had a major stack on my butt on the deathtrap's trapdoor the other day.  The slope approaching my rocky mountain high likes to lure one into a false sense of security with its lush grass and seemingly low gradient, then pulls the mud out from under you.  Nothing is as it seems. 

Unless you stopped for a second and said to yourself, "ooh, that doesn't look as it seems.  That looks a tad treacherous.  Best to not venture that way today". Insight.  Sometimes helps to have some.

Following my somewhat graceless slide, I almost immediately regretted it. Mainly because I looked like I'd just survived a mining disaster and I needed to pick up milk on the way home. I've now noted this is a perfectly safe approach to the mountain on the proviso that you don't go anywhere near it when it has liquid on it. 

Speaking of articles for the foot, it has been raining pigs and horses lately - a shitload, in layman's terms - so I've purchased a stylish pair of gumboots because I'm tired of walking to work in cute but cheap flats that are made of Bangladeshi cardboard that disintegrate in water. Or sometimes they just disintegrate in thin air.

And speaking of 'air', and amazingly accurate segues, when you Google 'air' you don't get the atmosphere first.  No.  That's just silly.  No-one wants to know about 'air' when they type 'air' into The Google.  Want they really want to know about is 'Air', a presumably noisy and annoying French band that is named after the somewhat important atmospheric substance.  

Future generations won't know what the hell they are breathing in and out all damn day but they will know the name of some mediocre French indi band who were somehow noteworthy between April and May 2014.

Ants in Space

Last weekend the National Geographic Channel hooked up with NASA for 'Live from Space', a two-hour broadcast live from the International Space Station (ISS), to showcase what the heck it is that astronauts do all day when they are stranded in the middle of intergalactic nowhere on what looks like a flimsy-looking hunk of sheet metal.

I quite enjoyed the transmission, but for something so extraordinary the astronauts certainly did their gosh darndest to make it sound routine and run-of-the-mill; for example, advising viewers that Saturday morning is earmarked for vacuuming the aluminium foil vessel they call home for months at a time.  Boy, who wouldn’t want to be an astronaut.

I assume they were dumbing it down for the Superidiots, who doubtless think the ISS is located somewhere in Idaho.  Part of the telecast involved the astronauts looking out the windows and pointing at remote villages in Greenland that no-one cares about.  

Unfortunately they wrote on the TV screen what these places are called with special magic outer space marker pens, so now the Superidiots will think that earth looks exactly like an atlas from outer space. 

Those astronauts do however have a groovy but legless Robonaut aboard the ISS who carries out all the daunting work that they are too chicken to do, like beer runs to the next galaxy, or mundane tasks that they can’t be arsed doing, like beer runs to the next galaxy.  NASA are currently training Robonaut to remotely perform some medical tasks, like giving injections... I’m pretty sure I never want a robot jabbing a needle into my arm ever. 

The ISS is also currently running a research program for kids called Ants in Space.  It sounds kind of like the Pigs in Space program, but with ants.  Basically a bunch of really, really smart ants have been suited up in cute little astroant suits and their group behaviour in micro gravity is being monitored so a bunch of high school kids can watch live from earth and learn the hard way that even ants are smarter than them.

I hope that all the astronauts are informed of this experiment, just in case the ants escape and get a hit of Mortein up their noses.

How to stop losing shit

Many of us frequently lose common everyday items. Our patience, appetite, hope, remote control, teeth, eye glasses, sight, weight, trust, sanity, our mind, job, virginity, the left sock, motivation, fucking keys. I hate misplacing my keys.

I imagine the reason I often misplace my keys is because my butler, Jeeves (he is one gigantic stereotype), generally opens all doors for me, except not always. Jerk. Must fire Jeeves next time I see him.

Those infuriating people who never lose shit say that the best way to avoid losing shit is to keep shit in the same place you kept it before you lost it so it won’t be lost. Those people give me the shits, but their strategy has some merit, I suppose. You lose shit that doesn’t have a home.  Got it.

Which is all very brilliant, but that mystery plane that the world has lost had a home and a routine flight path, and now it’s not where it’s supposed to be. It’s 1000% lost, lost, lost.

Check in here. Is that the plane?
Oh, it's just a giant lemon.

Maybe it’s true what flight attendants say; the plane will fall out of the sky and you will plummet to your death unless your tray table is locked and secure when they damn well tell you to do it.

How do you lose a fairly sizeable plane? It’s baffling, and a little incomprehensible, that all the sophisticated technology and the support of the world’s best spy agency have not been able to find some evidence of the mysterious jumbo's location, or indeed of its existence.

It seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. So maybe we should check if it’s made a landing on Mars then. Sometimes I accidently put my keys in the laundry for some inexplicable reason, so it’s good to check in places you don’t think it will be. Maybe check Antarctica too; the earth’s fridge.

The Perfect Mountain Mud Cake

Mount Taylor in Canberra. It’s my rocky mountain high, except it’s not that high, which is why I regularly go up and down and up and down, and sometimes up and down again. If it wasn’t so diminutive I wouldn’t need to torment myself in such a manner.

It’s recently rained a terrible shitload in Canberra; shitload being the layman’s understanding of a lot of anything. 230 years of rain in just under two hours, I’ve heard. Public sector gossip is hardly ever incorrect. Rain is great for the most part, except for the fact it turns my favourite mountain running track into a dangerous and unstable mud and sludge speedway.

I went up there the other day for the first time following The Rains. It was a treacherous mud-made death wish. When I went up a few days later it was the perfect consistency of water and dirt. I think of mountain dirt as a bit like icing on a cake. I think about mountain dirt quite a lot, particularly the exuberance one feels when it is the perfect consistency.

With the right temperature, the right ingredients and the right pan, you too can make the perfect chocolate mountain mud cake.

Here’s how:

Prep time: How long is a storm?
Cooking time: None required
Serves: Generally your arse on a baking tray

Method:

- Preheat sun to 38c
- Bring in the clouds
- Add 350 million cups of rainwater and 300 million cups of loose dirt (you will note these quantities make the cake completely shit so you will need to add more dirt as necessary if you don't want to die when sliding off your cake)
- Cocoa makes a great alternative to loose dirt, Willy Wonka
- Add 1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
- Beat dirt and water with an electric blender until slippery and dangerous
- Spread over mountain
- Finished.

Fortunately I am descended from a long line of mountain goats on my father’s side, so that’s quite convenient. I don’t have any evidence to verify this cross breeding program, but I do love running on mountains, lots of goathumans on my father’s side also love it, and I have four legs, so there’s that.

Brain fartin'. Travellin'.

It’s been a while since I felt a blog communicado coming on. My lemon zest for writing has been on the wane of late, which is probably a positive because it usually involves me spewing a constant stream of inane information, some of which sometimes makes sense on occasion.

I’ve been thinking a bit in recent times about how my brain garners me no favours. A few years ago it decided, in its great lack of valuable opinion or feedback, that it wanted to write The Novel one day and apparently I’m supposed to just go along with this harebrained idea that would require considerable skill, time and effort. I mean, what the feck? A fairly unreasonable and improbable goal. Thanks a lot, brain.

It certainly didn’t consult me in the decision making process, if there even was one, which is no great revelation.

Let’s write a book! Oh, great idea.
Let’s overstay our working holiday visa in England! Excellent plan.
And my personal favourite – let’s join the public sector! Oh, can we!?

ANYWAY. I’ve just purchased a new superlative suitcase for my next holiday later this year. My current suitcase has had a tough life, thanks to Qantas for losing it for six days and sending it on a round-the-world expedition to return it to me. Once I received it in Florida, it had so many airline sponsor stickers on it I thought it had joined a Formula One team as a Grid Suitcase.

I’ve barely recovered from my last rendezvous with the world’s airports, if we are being generous enough to consider New Zealand part of ‘the world’. It was six weeks ago, which is about 200 days, give or take. My trip to UnZud's aiports was tremendously successful, in no small part because it did not involve American airports.

Speaking of Other Countries, one of my favourite things about my forthcoming 5-week international to my Mother Country of England (not my Mother Country in the traditional understanding of mother country) is that fact that I’m not venturing to that place where the vast majority of French people live. Le bullet dodged.

The Hybrid

On my recent trip to New Zealand we were accidently given a Toyota Camry Hybrid hire car to speed around at or under the speed limit in.  Drive responsibly, kids.

The securing of The Hybrid must have been the result of a processing error or a shortage of normal cars or something because I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t want it, because hybrid cars are for self-righteous eco hippies and I didn’t want to be put into that whacky hemp basket.  I mean, if you’re that concerned about the environment, then walk.

It's just like your car.

As it turns out, I loved driving the Labradoodle crossbred vehicle.  It was quiet, economical, loved meeting new cars, didn’t bark once, often retrieved lunch and roadkill hedgehogs for us, and wore a big pink pom-pom on its boot.  Cute. 

The jury is still out for me on whether it was a crossbreed, a product of human intervention, or a mongrel that came into the world when its mummy and daddy met on a dark highway in remote New Zealand, sans human mediation.  It’s a big mystery for sure.

One of the key issues with driving around in a car that is a novelty item is you have to deal with endless man ‘me sees car, me likes car’ questions, because males like talking about cars and they apparently love talking about hybrids, because they are just so interesting to talk about.

What I had to deal with on one occasion:

How does the car handle?                 

Well, it has wheels and they drive on the road.

Is it economic?                                   

Well, it's probably a false economy.

It sure has nice lines.

I don't even know what that means. I certainly don't know why it matters.

How does it reverse?

I call on the little elf who lives in the place where there should be an engine or whatever and he reverses for me.

Tennii business

It's Australian Open time again!  How is it here again already?  Like moths through the hourglass, so are the lights on Rod Laver Arena.  I don't know if that makes any sense, I just write down whatever crap is emitted from my brain.  Anyway, it seems like it's always January.

And I'm sick and tired of you hanging on me, January. You make me sad with your eyes and you're telling me lies.  And stuff.  If you're not familiar with Day 70's pop music then this post has presumably gotten off to a shaky start.

One of my favourite things about tennis at this time of year is watching from my air conditioned lounge room as crowds in Centre Court sweat bucketloads of beer and champagne out of their pores.  As much as I'd love to go down to Melbournio one year, it is just so much more palatable watching in front of the flatscreen box.

I also like the order at the tennis and the fact that people don't generally get about with slimy fried chicken containers on their head as per any Australian cricket game.

And the Ball Children are pretty impressive. And scary.  They get smashed in the face by a Federer ace and just stand there.

You'll probably need a longer cord.

I'm pretty sure those ballbots are Trons, because when they get their rare glamourous closeup you can see an input/output junction on the backs of their necks.

And in the tradition of anything Apple or Samsung, you have to go out into the world of shops searching for the 2 km ballbot USB cord yourself. And then you have to make sure they are in range. It's hit and miss really; a bit like Federer's game these days.

In 2010 a ballboy unfortunately peed his pants during a game.  It happens.  But usually not with an audience of millions of judgemental home viewers.

They had to replace the ballbot and put sawdust down, or whatever you put down when somebody throws up. Then they had use the blower to dry the court but the blower had no gas in it so it took forever.  I know this because a player TALKED ABOUT IT IN THE PRESS CONFERENCE.  Yep, therapy for life for that little ballbot.

Journey to Middle Earth

The Magic of Mordor
I’ve just returned from a splendid journey to the south island of New Zealand, or Mordor in Middle Earth as cyberhobbits may prefer it. New Zealand is banging, as the kids say these days.  Though given I do not fully understand their interpretation of banging - I’m reasonably sure it has nothing to do with carpentry - I will just call New Zealand out as ludicrously amazing. Breathe taken away, etc etc.

You know when people tell you “you have to go to *insert any country that is not in the middle east*, it is amazing"? Well, you have to go to New Zealand. I am not kidding around; if you are into babbling brooks, alps, glaciers and hobbitses, you MUST go.

Since that Tolkien dragon fantasy book series, Bossman of the Bracelets or whatever, was turned into a movie trilogy and filmed in the NZ alps, the poor country has really struggled with being typecast as a land of jaw-dropping, breathtaking scenery.  While New Zealand laps up the attention, their rightful punishment is bothersome holiday-makers and day-trippers by the fast and furious busload.

The scenery is nauseating - pass me a bucket - and if you stare at it long enough it will ruin any other scenery you will ever see in your life in other countries that aren’t as pretty. Thanks a bunch, New Zealand.  But it’s true; I now can’t look at a mountain without comparing it to NZ’s remarkable alps. The alps are actually called The Remarkables, and it really is a toss-up between Switzerland and this place in my humble opinion.

I can’t stand Lorraine
As beautiful as New Zealand is, it didn’t stop fucking raining for the eight days I was there. When it wasn’t raining torrentially, it was sprinkling annoying drizzle into one's face. However, it just meant that I had the Mordor experience rather than the Hobbiton experience, which was just a little bit more amazing.

I’ve never had the best relationship with rain. As an Aussie I’m supposed to get all excited whenever it pelts down because of our droughts and bushfires and other annoying factors that come into play when you live in a fucking desert, but I really don’t care for rain.

And when you hate on the rain those people who own “gardens” that they have to “water” “every day” get all cranky. Never mind that rain literally falls from the sky, these people think Australia is going to plunge into a psychotic apocalyptic nightmare where rogue water bands will kill us all just for a drop of it.

So when you go to NZ, you’ll need to get yourself some type of self-contained breathing apparatus – yes, SCUBA gear. Because it rains lots.

I haven’t even started my tour debrief of Cardrona, Wanaka, Queenstown, Franz Josef, Fox Glacier and Hamner Springs, so I'll have to capture all that in another post.

Christchurch UnZud, Interrupted

I've just returned from a whistle stop tour of New Zealand, which involved making a bunch of brief appearances and interesting yet random speeches about the botched evolution of New Zealand's famed tectonic plates in various cities, town and small remote villages of the South Island.

I was enormously well received, except where I wasn't. Like that one time in Queenstown, but I probably won't go into that in any great detail. One travelled with one’s old school friend, who is not old at all but quite youngish like oneself.

We began our journey through Middle Earth in the beautiful city of Christchurch, that place that decided to build itself directly on top of the Pacific and the Endo-Australian tectonic plates. That crazy town town straddles both dem plates, a planning strategy that straddles the boundaries of completely nuts and the worst idea ever. We did a little tour of the city of Christchurch, which was devastated in the 2011 earthquake.

This:

About 30% of the city's buildings are still standing and operational, while the rest have either been razed or are being held up with all manner of scaffolding. It seems most businesses have either relocated to other premises outside the city or have moved on from Christchurch altogether.

Although, as if often the case in cities devastated by hardship, innovation and industriousness have fashioned a new settlement.

The brains trust of the Christchurch city Re:START project have developed a village of funky, colourful shipping containers that will temporarily house a multitude of businesses, including designer shops and coffee shops, until those businesses decide on more permanent dwellings. It looks pretty impressive and adds much needed colour to a once beautiful city that is recovering from immense loss.

I seem to be out of blog practice, which will make charting the other eight days interesting.